THE STORY Meinekestrasse 21, Berlin: May 1, 1945 Ilse Margret Vogel, a painter, writer and anti-Nazi firebrand, clings to the precious apartment that has been her home and refuge during a decade of political and social insanity. Despite a final furious Allied bombing raid that shakes the building to its foundation, Ilse will not leave. Oskar Huth, her lifelong friend and fellow resistance fighter, begs her to take refuge in a nearby bomb shelter. But Ilse refuses, preferring the psychological solace of a cyanide capsule kept in a locket around her neck. Defiant, stubborn and idealistic, Ilse would rather die by her own hand than to helplessly immerse her life in the tumult that engulfs her homeland and the treachery that has taken her country’s soul. When an Allied bomb blows up a nearby gasoline depot, Oskar forces Ilse to abandon her house and to take cover in a nearby basement. In those dank, cramped and filthy confines, Ilse confronts her greatest nightmare: a roomful of cowering German Army officers and their families solemnly awaiting the onrushing Soviet troops. With little to live for – a shattered soul in a shattered country – Ilse once again contemplates taking her own life. Oskar intervenes, but fears he cannot protect his friend for much longer. Ilse’s sanity clings to her one last hope: that the Russian armies advancing into Berlin will deliver her from her treacherous countrymen. But the Russians are not the heroic liberators Ilse expects: barbaric, murderous mercenaries, they indiscriminately slaughter all that resist and rape even the most defenseless women. Collaborators and resistance fighters fall indiscriminately before their fury, which has been fueled by three long, cold years of warfare on the Eastern front. Faced with rape and death, Ilse finds a last, miraculous reserve of psychological strength and decides on a course of action that will either save her life — or condemn her to certain death…