Bill Greenstone, an Englishman living in Berlin, has to decide whether to move to Cracow to be near Marta Szadkowska, an expert on Japanese art, or to stay in Berlin, to be comforted by Uta Schmidtbauer, his Marxist-Leninist cleaning lady. In Berlin, he discovers that from the house in which he lives, in the years 1942 - 44 twenty-one people were deported to the East, eleven of them on one day to Auschwitz. In Cracow, at the Remuh synagogue, he meets Lewenherz Maks, from whom he hears the story of the destruction of Jewish Kazimierz. And finds the courage to admit that Siemens, for whom he has worked for the last twenty years, had been intimately involved in the Nazi crimes against humanity. Through these painful confrontations, he is able at last to look clearly at his own loss, the death of his son, and to decide his future.