At the age of twelve, Ella experiences with brutal harshness what it means to be a German in Czechoslovakia after 1945. Revolutionary guards kill her father, and her mother must hide with her newborn son in a Czech village. Ella is left to fend for herself, enduring one misfortune after another: a convent school, communism, a marriage to an egocentric man, and a psychiatric hospital – until she finally meets her great love in Prague. With the Jewish doctor Milan, she is happy for the first time and feels secure. They both have one wish: to flee to the West together with Ella's little daughter. But the secret police are hot on their heels.