At the beginning of the Second World War, after the fall of France, Churchill decides to demilitarize the islands in the English Channel, Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark, and allow their occupation by the Nazis because of their proximity to the Occupied French coast. We see the effects of this upon clerk Marlene Zimmer, the child of a deceased Jewish father and Gentile mother. She abruptly leaves her home to avoid registering as a Jew, meets the Surrealist artists and longtime lovers Claude Cahun (Lucille Schwob) and Marcel Moore (Suzanne Malherbe) and becomes active in their Resistance work. After Cahun and Moore are captured by the secret police, she flees and meets Peter, an escaped Polish slave worker. We follow Suzanne and Lucille as they suffer in German military prison, and revisit Marlene as she slowly realizes that the decisions she has made resulted in the imprisonment of one woman and the saving of the life of another.