Synopsis
Background: Belarus, 1942. The Nazi occupation is at its height.
A partisan war rages in the German hinterland. The brigades fight the occupying forces from their hideouts in the forests. They charge on German-occupied villages, blow up military transports, take revenge on traitors and collaborators.
An act of sabotage was committed near the farm where the railroad worker Suschenja has his dwellings. A train was blown up.
Suschenja had nothing to do with this, but he was arrested anyway, along with the saboteurs. The German officer leading the investigations has the partisans executed, but he lets Suschenja go free, punishing him this way to refuse collaboration with the Germans. It is a message to the partisans. Immediately, all talk about Suschenja's „treason“. The partisans Burov and Wojtik travel to Suschenja's farm, to revenge the death of their comrades.
Suschenja begs them not to kill him in front of his wife and his child.
The partisans lead their victim into the forest. On the way, they are ambushed. Suschenja and his would-be executor Burov, now deadly wounded, are left alone in the forest.
Now, Suschenja hopes for salvation. He believes that he may be able to convince the partisans of his innocence if he could just manage to bring the heavily wounded Burov into the partisan's camp. In the loneliness of the swampy forest, in a world without intruders and friends, where the line between treason and heroism, friend and foe, war and peace is so very thin, so very removed from any immediate understanding, Suschenja, a victim of adverse circumstances, fights for his right to live.