During Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, literature professor Evgenia Ginzburg is falsely convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and sentenced to 10 years hard labor in a Gulag. Having lost everything, and no longer wishing to live, she meets Dr. Anton Walter (Ulrich Tukur), a Crimean German political prisoner who is a camp doctor in Kolyma. He recommends her for a position as a nurse in the camp infirmary. They fall in love and, slowly, Evgenia begins to come back to life.