Sometimes a little kid thing causes a lot of grief. Twelve-year-old Tomáš (F. Renč) is going through a bad time at school and his classmates get him into trouble. When he goes to a convenience store with them, they steal some change, throw it in his briefcase and run away. Thomas is caught by the manager. But he doesn't tell his classmates and eventually runs away too. He hides in a game preserve with white deer. The gamekeeper (R. Brzobohatý) finds him there, but Tomáš refuses to return home. Eventually, the two meet once more, and this time it will be a happy meeting.
An escort composed of three people transports a huge amount of new one-hundred crown banknotes in a special railway car. At the 196th kilometer, a village girl is waiting at the railway crossing and spots two men removing some packages from the track. The scene is immediately followed by the report of a gun and the unwanted witness is shot dead. Soon afterwards, on the 201st kilometer, the train explodes. Only one of the escorts Lenk (Radoslav Brzobohatý) survives the explosion, taken to hospital with serious injuries. Criminologist Major Kalas (Jirí Sovák) and the very young Second Lieutenant Karlícek (Jaromír Hanzlík) patiently gather facts, leads and testimonies.
The bridegroom Jan Kaspar is an officer in the Klement Gottwald's Nová Hut rolling-mill. After bidding farewell to his freedom, he accidentally takes a sip from the bottle of tetrachlore which he stores at home. He disregards the dizziness, but the next day, he faints in the factory and has a brain concussion. During her regular tests, doctor Dudková is shocked by a high percentage of residual nitrogen found in Kaspar's blood. Doctor Bohácek, with whom Dudková consults, thinks that it is a liver disease and informs the head physician Filip. The doctors know nothing about tetrachlore and are in the dark about the case. Despite that, they immediately start to fight for Kaspar's life and their struggle consequently affects their personal lives.
Good-natured and garrulous, Švejk becomes the Austrian army's most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of World War I -- although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it. Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle.
Prague, during World War II. Hana Kaufmann, a Jewish ophthalmologist, marries Dr. Antonín Bureš, a Christian man. When her family is sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, their romance turns into a struggle for survival.