The film is set in Silesia, a disputed piece of provincial real estate that has variably belonged to both Poland and Germany. This tragi-comic family saga opens in 1939. Ewald is called up to Polish army. Antek, his brother, stays et home, watching his beautiful sister-in-law with cow- eyed longing. Then, he decides to volunteer in Wehrmacht. However, Antek returns home in 1945 as NKVD officer. On the fateful night that the Soviet march into Poland he manages to consummate his lust, and Janek, a hunchback, is born. As Janek grows, the tensions between the boy and his father increase. The course of modern Poland, as it is shaped in those crucial years, parallels the familys changes, and the allegorical meaning of the film is brought into focus particularly through the chameleon-like transformations of the charismatic Antek, who becomes in succession, a priest, a German soldier and NKVD officer, a communist party official, an oppositionist, and finally a Western businessman.