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.