This Central European costume melodrama tells the tale of an affair between a POW and an officer's wife. Anezka is the wife who comes to visit her husband, a major, in Stryj, a town in the midst of a war. The major is dying after he sustained third-degree burns during a recent attack perpetrated by the wife of an executed terrorist. That he had been in a brothel at the time did nothing to prevent him from receiving a hero's accolades. Anezka is not impressed. She gets a job as a nurse in a military hospital. There she meets the handsome prisoner and falls in love. Her love is not enough to give the POW hope and he refuses to escape even though she has provided him with the means. Tragedy ensues.