After the Russian Civil War, Russian worker Andrei Sokolov marries his beloved Irina and seventeen years later, the couple has a son and two daughters. The family man Andrei is summoned by the Red Army as a truck driver in World War II and he promises to Irina that he will return to his family. Andrei drives through a road that is bombed and he is captured by the Germans and suffers in the prison camps. He finds strength to resist the maltreatment of the German soldiers thinking in Irina and his children. Andrei succeeds to escape from the Germans and finds that Irina and their daughters were killed during the bombing of their house and his son Anatoly is a Captain in the Soviet Army. Near the end of the war, Anatoly dies and Andrei does not see any motive to live until she sees Vanya, a starving orphan begging on the streets of Uryupinsk.
—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil