The young and talented photographer Maxim Kaverin has a good life: an interesting work, the beautiful wife Olga. Suddenly he receives an order for a series of shots of one of the old houses of the city. The hero goes to take pictures and does not suspect what tragedy is going towards.

Occupied France, 1942. Gilles is arrested by SS soldiers alongside other Jews and sent to a camp in Germany. He narrowly avoids sudden execution by swearing to the guards that he is not Jewish, but Persian. This lie temporarily saves him, but Gilles gets assigned a life-or-death mission: to teach Farsi to Head of Camp Koch, who dreams of opening a restaurant in Iran once the war is over. Through an ingenious trick, Gilles manages to survive by inventing words of "Farsi" every day and teaching them to Koch.