In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival upon trying to salvage from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son.
A young girl grows up to become a strong and fearless woman in Budapest before World War I.
A young boy after the Hungarian uprising of 1956, raised by his mother with the tale of an idealized dead father, is confronted with a brutish man who claims to be his real father.