Locked away in the Jewish ghetto of an occupied Ukrainian town in 1941, a mother revisits her life in a last letter to her son.
　　In 1941, a Russian Jewish woman doctor lives in a small city in the Ukraine just seized by the Germans. She
　　writes a last letter to her son, a famous Russian physicist who lives and works far from the front lines at a
　　Soviet science research institute. She writes the letter a few days before she knows she and the other Jews
　　in the city will be killed by the Germans. She speaks of her life, her relationship to her son, her love for him,
　　her student life in Paris, her failed marriage.
　　She recounts the reaction of her Russian and Ukrainian neighbors to the arrival of the Germans, the various
　　responses of the Jewish community, the cruelty and horrors of the occupation, the help of some Russian
　　neighbors, the greed and indifference of others, and her slow recognition that her Jewish heritage is more
　　important to her than her Russian nationality or Communist ideology.