A biology professor, Adam enters a hospital for observation. He is a loner and a serious-minded man, who dislikes any display of emotions. He spends three months in the hospital while being tested. After observing patients and hospital routines around him from a distance, he learns that he will need a kidney transplant. Meanwhile his personal and professional life is falling apart: he refuses his wife's offer to donate the kidney for him; the scientific problem he was working on has been solved elsewhere. In the end Adam cracks under the prolonged pressure, waiting for the sound of an ambulance bringing a moribund patient whose kidney may be used for the transplant.

A man approaching middle age gets more than he bargained for when he tries having an extramarital affair while his wife is away.

In 1920s Poland, a police commissioner leads the investigation into a series of brutal murders of young boys as the case grows increasingly unsettling and personal.

A man suffering from tuberculosis returns from abroad to stay at his brother's farm, hoping to make amends, while also beginning a love affair with a farm girl.

Seven women gather to hear one of them tell a story of a strange incident that happened to a certain dead man.

Film opens with the mad rush of haphazard freedom as the concentration camps are liberated. Men are trying to grab food, change clothes, bury their tormentors they find alive. Then they are herded into other camps as the Allies try to devise policy to control the situation. A young poet who cannot quite find himself in this new situation, meets a headstrong Jewish young girl who wants him to run off with her, to the West. He cannot cope with her growing demands for affection, while still harboring the hatred for the Germans and disdain for his fellow men who quickly revert to petty enmities.

The protagonists of the film are residents of a nursing home run by nuns. One of the nuns, Maria, wants to introduce discipline, but it is not easy. The elderly residents decide to fight for their independence. Their plans are thwarted by the departure of the leader of the rebellion. But the men will not give up so easily.

Beginning of WWII. Zinaida, a Russian woman, is taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp together with several other women. She is imprisoned with her baby son, Gena, who is learning to walk and takes his first steps in the snow, in the concentration camp. They spend a few years together in the camp until they are separated, first within Auschwitz itself, then, for good, when the Germans are losing the war and decide to evacuate.

A married couple raising a mentally ill son struggles with the thought of putting him in an institution.