The story takes place before World War II and centers on Pawel, a member of a conservative, middle-class family, and his love for Lidka, a taxi dancer. Social conventions and the lovers' inability to defy those forces Pawel and Lidka benefit. Times change, war breaks out, leading to Pawel sent to Auschwitz while Lidka marry his cousin. Their love has survived and conventions are no longer the issue.

An unlikely couple - a Polish concentration camp inmate and a young German girl - stick together and try to survive the RAF bombing of Dresden in February 1945.

During the Second World War, an old fortress is transformed into a detention camp for arrested allied generals who the Germans provide with every possible comfort. In the nearby garrison camp, however, hundreds of captured private soldiers try to survive hunger and cold.

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

A beautiful Polish girl whose lover has gone to Rome to seek a divorce from his previous wife travels around Europe in search of him and suffers a variety of tragic adventures as the men around her try to fit her into their own selfish schemes.

Zenon Ziembiewicz, a young, budding journalist, comes to his parents' manor house for a vacation. Here he enters into an affair with the lovely Justyna Bogutówna, the daughter of a cook. When the canicule comes to an end, Zenon packs his bags and leaves for Paris to study. Returning after a year with a doctorate in political science, he makes a fast and glamorous career. He becomes the editor-in-chief of the local newspaper and, soon after, mayor of the city. He also marries Elzbieta Biecka, but still does not break up with Justyna.

A Polish writer is arrested by the Nazis in 1942 and sent to the notorious Pawiak prison in Warsaw. He will spend the next 111 days fighting for survival.

There has been a secret relationship between the nephew of the ordinate - Jan, and his older cousin Xymena. However, Jan falls in love with the foster daughter of the ordinate, the young Krystyna. The ordinate does not consent to marriage, because Krystyna is his illegitimate daughter, and thus Jan's cousin. But it turns out that Jan is not the son of the general's brother ...

The 1937 trial of communist journalists, working for the same student magazine in Vilnius, is shown through the tragic life of the paper's young collaborator Julek Szulc.

A two-part historical film covering the years of the First World War and the post-war period up to 1919 - until the signing of the peace treaty in Versailles near Paris. An attempt to show the great and complicated process of regaining an independent existence by a nation within its own state. The screen shows characters from history textbooks: Józef Piłsudski, Ignacy Paderewski, Roman Dmowski, Wojciech Korfanty as well as representatives of the world political scene, incl. David Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, Vladimir Lenin and others.