The Jewish family Jelin is driven out of their Warsaw appartement and into the ghetto. David, the son of Jakob and Hanne Jelin, escapes the deportation train to Auschwitz and joins the partisans. He survives and gets after the end of the war to know that his father died and that his mother is reorted missing. In Warsaw he makes the aquaintance of Dora Berkowitz who, desperate because of the death of her parents, does not know how to go on. They both leave Poland for the American-occupied zone of Germany. David hopes to find his mother and to be able to leave Europe from there. They are interned in the overcrowded camp for diplaced persons in Landsberg, where they marry. Eventually they find the mother in a German hospital and they all long to leave Germany soon.