Synopsis
When love, friendship, and fate connect a simple Polish country boy, the daughter of a local farmer, a young German soldier, and Jewish girl from Warsaw, each of them pay with much more than their innocence.
1943. The Polish countryside. After the great defeat at Stalingrad, Germany begins sending younger and younger recruits to war. That is how GUIDO, a sensitive seventeen-year-old, found himself in Poland. While serving near a small village, he tries to escape the brutality of the war and the simplistic point of view of his much older fellow soldiers. He has a secret hideaway in the attic of the post where he listens to forbidden jazz records and dreams of better times. At the same time, ROMEK, tries to help his single mother by working as an assistant rail engine operator. He dreams of two things:to captain his own train like his father had done before going missing, and to win the heart of FRANKA, the daughter of well-to-do farmer.
While helping drive the engine, Romek makes regular stops at an abandoned train station where German transports to death camps dispose of suitcases and things of their victims. Unaware of the scope of the tragedy ist ymbolizes, it does not make an impression on him. When he takes an abandoned suitcase that houses a gramophone and some jazz records, fate brings him, Franka, and Guido together. That one moment will change each of their lives forever. Romek also meets BUNIA, a Jewish girl who managed to escape from one of the trains, and becomes her only hope for survival.
The ill-fated and unlikely connection of these four, in the context of a horrific war, leads to a series of tragedies. Who will survive is not entirely up to them alone.