Set during the occupation of Poland during World War II. Some German soldiers, slaughter a woman, her son and mother-in-law. The husband and his father escape by being in the forest. The young man decides to join the resistance but at the first meeting Gestapo kills his go-between and chase him. During his escape he gets into an apartment of a pregnant woman and helps her with the childbirth. He works in the typhus center where he is guinea pig for lice after being immunized to make more vaccine. He goes to the hospital to end a misery of a man mistaken by him and tortured where he seems to see his own body and is finally reconciled with himself.