Teenager Kristina Kleinburger, daughter of the commander of a concentration camp, arrives from bombed-out Berlin to visit her parents, whose life represents a world of harmony and peace for her. Her parents try to reinforce her illusions with ballet lessons, which are to be given by a former Hungarian prima ballerina. In a single day, contrary to the intentions and plans of her father, a typical German officer, Kristina's ideas and illusions about her parents' society and the security of home collapse, and the whole perversity and monstrosity of the German war and totalitarian mechanism emerges before her with tragic inexorability and the echo of the approaching end of the war. The story, setting, and characters of the film are fictional, only the tragedy of their fates is real.