The life of young French Resistance fighter Clémence enters a kind of limbo between her arrest by the Germans and her arrival at a concentration camp.

In 1943, when the whole of France was occupied, Claude Aveline (1901-1992) went into hiding under the name of Louis-Marie Martin. He miraculously escaped arrest in April 1944 and reached Arras. That same year, under the pseudonym Minervois, he published Le temps mort with Éditions de Minuit, a publishing house founded by his friend, designer Jean Bruller, who would later write the classic Resistance novel The Silence of the Sea under the name Vercors.