Tars and Spars

In 1943, while the Allies are bombing Berlin and the Gestapo is purging the capital of Jews, a dangerous love affair blossoms between two women – one a Jewish member of the underground, the other an exemplar of Nazi motherhood.

In 1944 Poland, a Jewish shop keeper named Jakob is summoned to ghetto headquarters after being caught out after curfew. While waiting for the German Kommondant, Jakob overhears a German radio broadcast about Russian troop movements. Returned to the ghetto, the shopkeeper shares his information with a friend and then rumors fly that there is a secret radio within the ghetto.

In 1942, in an occupied Paris, the apolitical grocer Edmond Batignole lives with his wife and daughter in a small apartment in the building of his grocery. When his future son-in-law and collaborator of the German Pierre-Jean Lamour calls the Nazis to arrest the Jewish Bernstein family, they move to the confiscated apartment. Some days later, the young Simon Bernstein escapes from the Germans and comes to his former home. When Batignole finds him, he feels sorry for the boy and lodges him, hiding Simon from Pierre-Jean and also from his wife. Later, two cousins of Simon meet him in the cellar of the grocery. When Pierre-Jean finds the children, Batignole decides to travel with the children to Switzerland.

During the 1940s, a group of young men go off to war, leaving behind Ethel Ann, who is in love with one of them, Teddy. In modern-day Belfast, a man named Jimmy endeavors to return a ring found in the wreckage of a crashed plane. He travels to Michigan, where the grown Ethel Ann, who married another man after Teddy was killed in battle, now lives. Ethel Ann must decide whether to go with Jimmy to meet the soldier who last saw Teddy alive.

While recovering in a hospital, war hero Jefferson Jones grows familiar with the "Diary of a Housewife" column written by Elizabeth Lane. Jeff's nurse arranges with Elizabeth's publisher, Alexander Yardley, for Jeff to spend the holiday at Elizabeth's bucolic Connecticut farm with her husband and child. But the column is a sham, so Elizabeth and her editor, Dudley Beecham, in fear of losing their jobs, hasten to set up the single, childless and entirely nondomestic Elizabeth on a country farm.

In Ancient Polynesia, when a terrible curse incurred by Maui reaches an impetuous Chieftain's daughter's island, she answers the Ocean's call to seek out the demigod to set things right.

Costanza is drinking a beer in a Prague pub, a summer night in 1968, while a violinist enters and starts playing a "canone inverso" for her. It is not a case, that music and that violin have a story behind that could concern her. It is the love story between Jeno Varga and the music, between Jeno and Sophie.

In 1943, a childless couple, the Čížeks, decide to hide a Jewish refugee, David Wiener, the son of Čížek's former employer, in the secret pantry of their apartment. Čížek is aware of the danger into which he has brought his household and his neighbours, but he takes helping his fellow man in need for granted. But at the same time, as a largely unheroic hero, he is dying of fear. His personal situation is greatly complicated by the approaching end of the war, when he faces danger from both the Germans and his "honest" fellow Czechs...