Stefan, a naive young Pole, meets Gunter, an artist in 1930s Berlin. Their passionate love affair is overshadowed by the rise of the Third Reich. Denounced to the Nazis, they are sent to Auschwitz as pink triangle prisoners. Some things even love cannot withstand. Forty years later Stefan returns to Poland with one question: when you have nothing left, how can you prove love ever existed? Berlin, 1936: optimism fades and the freedoms of the Weimar Republic are little more than a memory, yet the inhabitants of the city blind themselves to the approaching disaster. The Painting is a story of love, of survival, of a life lived at the mercy of one of the most terrible events of the last century.