The film is set in 1943 in an unusual mental asylum in the country. There are several incurable schizophrenic cases, the staff is bit strange, and a writer has voluntarily entered the clinic because he is "peculiar" and a drug addict. The Gestapo arrives and the commander asks for the list of patients, sorts out the Aryan doctors from the others on a return trip, and herds everyone into trucks for evacuation to the extermination camps. A young doctor momentarily escapes by covering himself under a pile of laundry in the basement, and then escapes to the woods just as the German soldiers appear.