Andrzej Piszczatowski

Martial Law in Poland. Marek the journalist steals a truck and starts his quest.

Film opens with the mad rush of haphazard freedom as the concentration camps are liberated. Men are trying to grab food, change clothes, bury their tormentors they find alive. Then they are herded into other camps as the Allies try to devise policy to control the situation. A young poet who cannot quite find himself in this new situation, meets a headstrong Jewish young girl who wants him to run off with her, to the West. He cannot cope with her growing demands for affection, while still harboring the hatred for the Germans and disdain for his fellow men who quickly revert to petty enmities.

After completing a project, a shipbuilder grows restless and travels the country on his motorcycle. He leaves behind his wife, a woman of virtue and responsibility, as he goes off on his amorous drunken escapades. He is part of a lost generation whose economic and vocational prospects have been severely limited in the decades following World War II. His summer cabin on the Baltic beach is torn apart by drunken revelers to feed a bonfire in this brooding and often depressing film.