Two young women are hitchhiking when they get picked up by a man who proceeds to sexually assault them. He disappears after that. The suspicion that the „girls" - having a reputation of being "loose" when it comes to sex - killed him, begins to grow.

After spending seven years in jail, Max Kulik returns home. At night he watches a girl in the house across the street, and her desparate anguish both touches and attracts him. For just a moment, it seems as if the two of them might manage to start a new life together.

Michael Lanzmann, a Viennese Jew of the war generation, receives a letter.