After five failed attempts to go to the United States, 18-year-old Ramón decides to look for a friend’s aunt in Germany, but never finds her. With no papers or money, and without knowing the language, he barely survives living on the street until he meets Ruth, an old retired nurse who doesn’t speak Spanish. Beyond language barriers and prejudices, they discover that solidarity and humanity make life bearable.
In this tragic melodrama, a man who has been hiding his Nazi past has it come back to haunt him when his hippie daughter, whom he disapproves of, comes back to bond with her daughter, whom he's been raising. Meanwhile, he and his drinking buddy, a beer-truck driver, go on a jaunt to Poland to recover some gold fillings he had hidden years ago during the time when he worked in a concentration camp. The truck driver inadvertently leaves a filling lying around at home, and his mother immediately recognizes it for what it is. When she confronts him, he claims that "Jews don't mean anything to me" and she must then reveal his Jewish heritage to him: she was a housekeeper in a Jewish household and he was a child there whom she adopted during the Holocaust in order to save his life. The driver then confronts the wily old Nazi, who conceives a brutal scheme which will save his cozy life at the expense of the reputations of the driver and his granddaughter.
