Set in the early 1950's, during the Stalin's Personality Cult. The story opens in a provincial town. Tomek's father, a former member of the Home Army is arrested so the mother is left with the task of raising two kids alone. The neighbor upstairs commits suicide when her husband is also arrested and transported to the prison camp. It's winter so the kids keep their hands warm at school by hand-beating themselves. The teachers at school are mean, narrow minded idealists, When they ask the kids who goes to church on Sundays, the whole class stands up to defeat the purpose of the propaganda lesson. Tomek is sent to the training school in the summer. There he absorbs most of the ideology pumped into his head, and when his father is released from prison he finds another boy he has left.

An arrogant medical man discovers there's more to his new patient than he imagined in this drama from Polish filmmaker Feliks Falk. Dr. Konstanty Grot (Borys Szyc) is an ambitious young doctor who is determined to make a name for himself, to the point that his wife often accuses him of being more interested in his career than in her. Grot believes that he can earn the respect of his peers by successfully treating a supposedly incurable patient, and he believes he may have found a likely candidate in Pawel Plocki (Grzegorz Wolf), a mental patient who can barely function. Grot signs Plocki out of the mental hospital where he's been treated for years and moves him into his own home; in time, Plocki shows genuine improvement, and Grot thinks he?s beaten the state medical establishment at their own game. But that?s before Grot learns some secrets about his patient that cast his condition in a new and disturbing light.