Kolja Mensing has often heard the romantic story of how his grandparents were engaged in 1943. When his grandmother is taken to the hospital, he has her tell it to him again all the same. This time, she also mentions Albert Fels, a Jewish livestock trader who during her childhood lived next door in the house of her uncle. At the beginning of the war, he is committed to a sanatorium and nursing institution, from where he never returns to the small village in northern Germany. One knows what happened at the time, says the grandmother, and thus the dark shadows of euthanasia and the Holocaust also fall on the story of the great love of her life.