Focuses on the lives of two married Polish couples (one Jewish, one Catholic) and the personal and social devastation wrought by the Holocaust and its aftermath.

After yet another failed attempt at producing gold, the alchemist Sir Lavoie, leaves the capital to seek the advice of a colleague in another city. His house is left to his three servants: the maid Doll, the footman Face and the lackey Satl. They decide to get rich by posing as alchemists and helping people solve their problems, even though they understand nothing of alchemy.

Elder auntie is visiting her relatives in order to find a perfect family and leave all her money to those ideal people.

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.

A beautiful and kind girl, daughter of Baba Yaga, finds a magical stone Alatyr while walking in a field. It transforms her heart into a stone and puts her under a queer curse. She is to be the evil Countess of Stones and live in a stone tower. If the greatest gem-cutter in the world brings the stone of Alatyr to life, though, she'll become the ruler of the world. The Stone Countess, now cruel and selfish, is fascinated with the idea. She starts searching for the best gem-cutters and forces them to work with Alatyr, so the magical stone would become a living thing. Neither of the gem-cutters succeeds, so she kills them. While being imprisoned in her tower, they work on a large book about the secrets of gem-cutting. Each of them edits the book, so it's later named "the Book of Masters".