A number of residents of a nursing home, along with the nurses, go on holiday for a week. Nurse Erik recalls memories of Paolo at one of the disabled ladies, Maria. In flashbacks we get to see the tragic love story of Maria and Paolo, which took place in Italy in the 1920s. After Maria has been raped by one of the black shirts from the circle around the young Mussolini, in which Paolo also resides, Paolo is shot as a deserter when he wants to flee with Maria. In the present of the film the nurse Erik falls in love with a colleague.

A factory worker is employed in the desolate, cold-storage cellars of a brewery. His spare time he devotes to collecting romantic images of wild flowers and sticking newspaper cuttings in an album, demonstrating a preference for more gruesome stories. Murders, rapes and acts of violence are the events which accompany his everyday existence and invest it with a tinge of color.

Maarten, a milquetoast bachelor living with his terminally ill mother, is haunted by a nightmare in which God tells him to lose his virginity or die within the week.

During the second world war law student Hannie Schaft is a member of the Dutch resistance movement.