When Yves-Marie, 9, asks Jacqueline, who is her age: "Marry me", she replies with a pirouette: "The day you go to the stars, I give you my hand."

Starting in 1944 in the wake of the Liberation and continuing into the '60s, 'houses of hope' were established to lend a semblance of continuity to youngsters orpahaned by the war. Nina's Home takes place between September 1944 and January 1946 in an orphanage housed in a chateau outside Paris. At the outset, the country residence is run by Nina who has a core population of French Jewish children whose parents are probably dead. Food is scarce. News of the Concentration Camps hasn't hit yet, but some months later, a contingent of youths arrive form the liberated camps. The children are a disparate, wild, damaged group and conflicts ensue. Nina's challenge is to help them make their first delicate moves toward the future and in the process restore all of them, including herself, to life.

Dad gets killed in a car accident and, later, as the family visits his gravesite, the little daughter begins imagining it is her older brother, Theo, as the one being visited.