Lucie was brought up by bourgeois parents as a passionate young fascist. At the age of eighteen, the headstrong protagonist decides to volunteer in the Nazi labour camps in Germany. Wishing to disprove what she sees as the lies that are being told about Nazi-Fascism, she instead encounters the horrors of life there - and is changed completely. Shedding her identity, she joins a group of deportees being sent to Dachau concentration camp. She escapes the camp in October 1944, and wanders around a Germany devastated by allied bombardments. Then, in February 1945, while helping dig in rubble seeking to rescue survivors, a wall falls on her and she is left paralysed from the waist down.