A young Jewish girl, Sara, is looking to escape the clutches of the Third Reich after seeing her parents and sister brutally slain by a smuggler who betrayed them while attempting to escape to England. Terrified, she is sheltered by her childhood friend Jean, a homosexual in a clandestine relationship with his lover Philippe.
June 1946: Stalin invites Russian emigres to return to the motherland. It's a trap: when a ship-load from France arrives in Odessa, only a physician and his family are spared execution or prison. He and his French wife (her passport ripped up) are sent to Kiev. She wants to return to France immediately; he knows that they are captives and must watch every step.
Heat, iron, dust and the smell of oil. A typical workday of maximum security inmates will prove to be fateful for all of them. They find something extraordinary inside one of the machines, and an unexpected wave of compassion makes the prisoners take hostages and block the entrance to the workshop and risk their lives, because sometimes the desire to be human is stronger than the survival instinct.
