Gyuri Koves is a Hungarian Jewish teenage boy caught up in the daily dramas of adolescence. When Nazi soldiers take over his native Budapest and begin imposing restrictions on the city's Jewish citizens, his comfortable life changes profoundly. Gyuri resents these restrictions, especially since he has never considered himself particularly Jewish. A rapid succession of events forces him to reconcile himself to this new daily reality. His father is taken by the Nazis and Gyuri himself is deported to a series of distant concentration camps, where survival becomes a daily goal. Gyuri prevails and is liberated by American soldiers. Still clad in his striped prison clothes, he returns to Budapest. Immediately, he senses the indifference of his neighbors to his experience. Former friends urge him to "put the ordeal out of his mind," while a sympathetic intellectual keeps referring to the camps as "the lowest circle of hell." Gyuri can relate to neither cliché and is left to ponder the meaning of his experience alone.