DRAMA SERIAL 6 X 60 MINS

When your house is on fire, your children are gone, what does it take to get them back?

London 1940: The Blitz rages Sam and Polly Markowitz are fighting about evacuation. When their kids get stuck with a drunk and his abusive wife, their marriage hits the rocks and Sam must expose a deadly secret before it destroys everything he loves.

The Nazis are sweeping through Europe. Hitler is planning to invade Britain. The bombs fall every night and the death toll is horrendous. Everything is rationed and thousands of children are separated from their parents and sent to the country, to live with total strangers. Many of them are resentful, only taking kids in for the ten bob a week the government pays them. The evacuation is a massive operation and a logistical nightmare. It plays havoc with children. Their parents often have no idea where their kids are. The host parents are overwhelmed, as are the towns and schools that get swamped with miserable kids from the inner cities. And every night the cities burn and the threat of Panzer divisions and Jackboots grinding and stomping along The Mall like they did on the Champs Elysee becomes more imminent. The whole country is freaking out, but everybody does their best. 

Except Sam. 

It takes the bombing of the house next door and the death of the family who lives there for him to relent and get the children out of London to safety. The gut-wrenching goodbye is unbearable. The weeks without word from the kids are endless. But when Polly and Sam find out the boys are billeted with a miserable drunk and his bitter, anti-Semitic wife in a village where the local kids are violently hostile to ‘vackies’, it’s clear they’ve made a terrible mistake- and not only about evacuation; it seems Sam is having an affair. Polly has to confront the truth about her decisions, Sam has to revisit his past in a burned out village in Ukraine where his first family was massacred and each must face the truth about each other. Ladybird, Ladybird is based on the true story of one family’s struggle to survive.