After WWII, Helene is ready to do anything to start a new life. As a young woman, she came to the exciting Berlin of the roaring 20s, wanting to become a doctor, and soon fell in love with a man named Karl. But the course of her life took a drastic, irreversible turn when the Nazis came into power.
In the spring of 1945, a train deporting hundreds of Jewish prisoners gets stranded near a small German village occupied by the Red Army. Condemned to each other and in a context of deep mistrust, desperation and revenge, an unexpected friendship emerges between Russian sniper Vera, village girl Winnie and Jewish-Dutch woman Simone.
Hamburg, Germany, summer 1988. A young bank employee embezzles a large amount of money using an ingenious technique and flees to Australia, from where he phones his girlfriend to tell her what he has done so easily; but her reaction is not what he naively expected.