Based on a semi-autobiographical 1960 novel by Roger Bousinnot, the film portrays the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942, when French police arrested over 13,000 Jewish inhabitants of Paris and held them under inhumane conditions for deportation to Auschwitz, where virtually all were murdered.

[1] On 16 July 1942 in Paris, Paul, a young student on the Left Bank, hears that the French authorities are rounding up the Jewish inhabitants of the city for deportation.

To make a gesture against the evil of the German occupation and the collaborationist French régime, he goes to a Jewish quarter on the Right Bank determined to save someone.

They already have the names and addresses, and can easily recognise Jewish people by the compulsory yellow star sewn to their clothes.

One young woman he is talking to, Jeanne, is called urgently into a shop, where the shopkeeper says that her mother and sister have just been taken and cuts the yellow star off her jacket.