Erzsi Pásztor

A Hungarian family forced to flee the Communist country for the United States must leave a young daughter behind. Six years later, the family arranges to bring the absent daughter to the United States where she has trouble adjusting. The daughter then decides to travel to Budapest to discover her identity.

The story shows Emma's and Böbe's fight for survival, for keeping their position in society which they achieved with hard work in the previous regime. They don't want to lose their place and become village girls again.

Lena Kuchler, a Holocaust survivor, searches a Polish refugee camp for lost family members in the months after the war but instead finds 100 starving children with nowhere to go and nobody who wants them. She takes it upon herself to care for them, leading first to an isolated retreat, where they encounter antisemitic violence, and ultimately, to an exodus to Palestine.

After the death of his father, Szilágyi faces Scruffy, the hairdresser, whom he has been dreaded since he was a child.

Widely known in the village how miser Berta is. Gossip says, even when her husband passed away a year ago she tried to buy a second-hand coffin to get him buried in. She's in good physical condition compare to her age, but one day she just can't get out of her bed. The village council hire a mom of 3 in order to help her in and around the house, and she paid by the council as Berta act like she has no money. Once, when the young mom doing her bed she finds her secret savings there, and turns out she is a wealthy woman. Now the council, as she can not be on social, decides to use her savings to pay her help, of course without letting her know that.

Angi Vera is a young nursing assistant in a hospital. When she speaks out against the appalling conditions, she is reprimanded, but the Communist Party takes her under its wing. She is sent for ideological training, where she learns to be an agitator in exchange for accommodation and meals. Meanwhile, she falls in love with one of her teachers, but she cannot live out her love within the walls of the strict school.

Peti, the young parachutist starts concurring with his fellows during the training sessions: who dares to fall free longer? Orodán, his coach decides that if needed, he would use force to make him give up this perilous rowdiness.

Stephen, living in a troubled family, breaks into a grocery store and wreaks vandalism. He is sent to a reform school. Later he works in a cleaning brigade and accidentally meets József Draskóczi, who denounced him. Draskóczi lives in an unloving, troubled atmosphere with his barren daughter and cynical son-in-law, ascetic about his youthful communist beliefs. He feels responsible for Istvan's fate, offering him a human voice and love. Despite his daughter's hysterical jealousy, he sends Istvan to school and then, through his previous connections, provides him with an apartment...