Tilo Mandel

After 50 years, Marek remembers his dangerous adventure as a five-year-old, when he and his friend Itzek left a Polish transit camp one night in 1942 – a few days before their evacuation to Auschwitz – to go get the toys they forgot at the ghetto. Based on Becker's personal memories and his 1980 short story "The Wall."

Everything changes for fifteen-year-old Heinz Stielke, a fanatical member of the Hitler Youth, when he learns that his father, who died as a war hero, was actually Jewish. Heinz is forced to leave school, loses his friends, and worst of all, his mother dies in a bombing raid. A kind-hearted police officer tries to get him a place at an orphanage in Thuringia, but on the way there, he is picked up by the SS and sent to a training camp.