Set in Poland during the years of the Nazi occupation, it is about two members of an upper middle class Jewish family, a young woman and her nephew, who avoid persecution as Jews by assuming Catholic identities.

[1] In parallel, we follow Maciek, now fifty years old and struck by the tragedy of the consequences of a lying childhood turning the rest of his life into an ongoing fiction.

In 1976, director Stanley Kubrick approached Isaac Bashevis Singer,[2] Nobel Prize in Literature winner of 1978, to write a screenplay about the Holocaust; he declined with, "I don't know the first thing" about it.

When it became known that Steven Spielberg's similar-themed movie Schindler's List would be a competitor at the box office at release time, the project was stopped with many roles having already been cast: Joseph Mazzello as the nephew, Johanna ter Steege[3] in the lead role, Elemér Ragályi designated as cinematographer.

[4] In 2005, William Monahan was hired to adapt Wartime Lies for Warner Independent Pictures in cooperation with John Wells Productions.