After his father loses his business and is taken to a labor camp, Gyorgy Koves soon finds himself baffled and alone at Auschwitz-Birkenau, struggling to find meaning in his tragic fate. Gyorgy stoically suffers the slings and arrows of concentration camp life. Amid the deprivation and brutality, he takes solace in the kindness of an array of characters. Gyorgy will have to draw on the memory of these small gestures of humanity when he returns to Budapest and realizes that the horrors he has experienced while interned have left him profoundly alienated from his post-war community.