In 1913, an orphaned young woman arrives in Budapest to take up employment as a milliner at the hat store that belonged to her late parents but becomes mired in a search for a brother she had never known of.

An office clerk as seen during her daily routine - all the little vibrations of her face. And a man, impatiently waiting for her, beyond the windows.

In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son, seeking to give him a proper Jewish burial.

In 1957 Budapest, one year following the failure of the Hungarian Revolution, a 12-year-old Jewish boy whose mother has raised him to believe that his father will return from the camps has his hopes shattered when a brutish stranger appears on the doorstep to take his family back.