A young architect is locked up in prison. He recalls his uncompromising youth and gradual sliding into the moral swamp of compromises. He was not alone. A group of his friends, dreamers and glass house builders, accompanied him.
Romek, an idealistc 19-year-old boy, takes a job as a tailor in the costume department of a Warsaw theater company where his new colleague, Sowa, is pressured to make a costume for an overbearing soloist.
The first Polish film to discuss the failure of September 1939 Polish-German war, seen from the point of view of a university intellectual, fascinated by German culture, who decides to take active part in the conflict.