As a child Friedrich Zawrel was a victim of the evil Nazi system; as part of their racial cleansing programme he was imprisoned, tortured and almost murdered. He survived all that. But when the Nazi dictatorship was over, and Friedrich Zawrel sought his fortune in the new Second Republic which had been created in Austria, he found himself confronted once again by the evil spirits of his past - in the shape of the former Nazi doctor Heinrich Gross. In 1975 the two men face each other in a prison cell: Friedrich Zawrel has been charged with theft, and Gross conspires to keep this witness to his own Nazi past behind bars. Years later, when the young journalist Florian Klenk begins to investigate the incredible story of Friedrich Zawrel, he comes up against a network of silence, guilt and shame. The film describes the life of an extraordinary, brave old man, whose battle for justice forced his tormentor, Gross, to face his own past - and sent shock waves through the entire Austrian judicial system.