Second entry in Russian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Picking up where 1938's My Childhood left off, the story covers the years in Gorki's life when the future writer (Alexei Lyarsky) was on his own, looking for a purpose and place in life.
This story of the Nazi prison camps in the 1930s deals with the attempts of the Nazi guards to break the spirit of the Communists in concentration camps.