In the horror of 1944 Auschwitz, a prisoner forced to burn the corpses of his own people finds moral survival trying to save from the flames the body of a boy he takes for his son, seeking to give him a proper jewish burial.

In 1913, an orphaned young woman arrives in Budapest to take up employment as a milliner at the hat store that belonged to her late parents but becomes mired in a search for a brother she had never known of.