A writer in 1930s Moscow has his work banned and is expelled from the official union, leaving him without income. He then writes a novel about a mysterious dark visitor and gradually starts confusing his real life with the story.
In 1942, Red Army officer Nikolai Kiselyov receives orders to evacuate over 200 Jewish women, children, and elderly men facing brutality and death in Nazi-occupied Belarus. These exhausted, starving, terrified and bereaved people, deeply scarred by the horrors they have witnessed, must trek hundreds of kilometers along forest paths to regain hope of survival and faith in the future.
It would seem that nothing is keeping the main character in Ivanovsk, especially since her sister Tamarka has settled well in Chicago and has been calling her for a long time. But she doesn’t go to America and doesn’t even want to.
