Georg Bütow

Klaus Burg and his 18-year-old daughter Alina live in the witness protection program and have built up a new, modest existence in a remote fishing village in Iceland.

While his wife Juliana commutes to Zurich as a doctor, Freddy is at home in Constance looking after their 13-year-old daughter Zoë and little Niko. Freddy believes that dropping out of medical school to work as a nursery teacher is the best decision of his life. When Juliana is offered the position of head of pediatric oncology, she wants to move to Zurich with the whole family. For her, this would mean an end to the exhausting commute, finally more time with her family and a higher income. Freddy, however, doesn't want to leave his familiar surroundings. Even he is not entirely without ambition in his poorly paid job, because Freddy has his own educational ideas - and has the prospect.

Gerta grows up in 1930s Brno in a mixed Czech-German family, which brings her into conflict with her father as he embraces Nazi ideology. Despite this, they remain connected through their shared love of music. During the occupation, Gerta joins the student resistance with her beloved Karel, but the war takes everything from her and leaves her with a dark secret that shapes her future. After the war, though innocent, Gerta is violently forced into the wild expulsion and must leave her hometown with her infant daughter. She survives the hardest years on a rural farm, reunites with Karel, and returns to Brno hoping for a normal life—yet the past continues to haunt her. The two-part TV film Gerta Schnirch offers a personal view of 20th-century history through the fate of a woman caught between two worlds.