housemothers

Eighteen-year-old Ellen is surprised by the unique surroundings of the Hallendorf School in Austria, where she discovers an eccentric world filled with wild children, experimental dancers, a tortoise on wheels, and Marek, a part-time gardener and fencing teacher whom Ellen is attracted to, but when Hitler's Reich threatens the school, Ellen realizes the dangers their love faces.

Young Englishwoman Ellen Carr, a housemother at an unorthodox boarding school in Vienna, has made a happy life for herself and the other workers and students she has taken under her wing, but the idyllic world she has created is disrupted when Hitler begins his reign of terror.

Frederica Hatch finds her comfortable world transformed by Laura Lee French, a new college dorm mother and former Rockette who had once been married to Frederica's father.