> Children and war—there is no more horrifying convergence of opposites in the world.
Aleksey Bartenev [Juozas Budraitis] returns to the city where he spent his childhood, a writer who grew up in an orphanage after losing his parents in the war—his father perished on the front, and his mother took her own life when he was an infant. He sets out on a quiet, stubborn search to reconnect with a past that memory itself seems to have erased. His goal is simple in scope but devastating in implication: to find his two brothers, whom he barely remembers, and to piece together a family that the war scattered to the edges of history.
Through dusty archival records and fragile testimonies, the truth begins to surface in fragments. The path leads him to Grigoriy Albertovich Krivoruchko [Nikolai Gubenko], a name that carries the weight of a life spent apart from the rest of the family. The trail then winds toward the fate of the siblings’ sister, Natasha, who died in 1947, a loss that still casts a shadow over the surviving memories. And it points toward the two elder brothers, each living in starkly different circumstances: Sergey Pogartsev [Georgi Burkov] has become a habitual criminal, his life shadowed by repeated prison terms; Denis Kuskov [Aleksandr Kalyagin], the middle brother, was adopted by a high-ranking Party official and raised far from the hardships that scarred the others.
As Alexey digests these connections, a painful truth about Denis emerges. Natasha had once visited Denis, though she kept the details to herself, and Denis himself initially pretends not to know their shared kinship. Later, with time having worn away the layers of denial, Denis confesses that he remembered everything and expresses a quiet regret for how he treated his sibling bond.
The film moves in tender, painful memory—a mosaic of a harsh post-war Odessa seen through the eyes of a child who is now an adult. One sequence recalls a desperate bargain among street kids: a boy who pretends to be mute, joining Natasha and others to swap a stolen gramophone for a piece of bread. In another moment, the children attempt to steal food from an apartment by distracting a woman with a chicken. Natasha provides the distraction while Alexey slips in via the balcony, only to be caught by a neighbor who happens to be a policeman, who hands him over to a state shelter for orphans. The tension between survival and loyalty threads through every recollection, highlighting how the search for family becomes a reckoning with the lasting wounds of war.
Throughout, the film leans on memory as its own kind of witness. The narrative voice returns again and again to the notion that what remains after the war is not just lost lives but a web of unspoken stories that continue to shape the living. The closing cadence arrives with a voiceover reading excerpts from Gennady Shpalikov's poem By Misfortune or by Happiness, anchoring Aleksey’s journey in a somber meditation on fate, memory, and the enduring ache of those left behind. It is a quiet, yet piercing reminder that the past does not end where memory fades; it lingers, insisting on being acknowledged, reinterpreted, and finally found in the hearts of those who dare to search.
