Hot summer of 1940, German troops invaded France. Along the roads of war, under bombs, an avalanche of desperate, mortally frightened people is rolling: cocottes abandoned by lovers, pampered bourgeois, poor people, cripples, old people, children. Everything fused in the crowd of refugees - compassion and meanness, courage and fear, selflessness and cruelty. Like all of France, the town of Bussy finds it difficult to come to terms with the fact that it has become a haven for occupiers... The novel by the famous French writer Irène Nemirovsky (1903–1942), who died in Auschwitz, mercilessly exposes the psychology of people during enemy occupation and resurrects a tragic page in French history.