AllMovie

This West German film chronicles the trials of a group of people fleeing the invading Russian army in 1944-45 in the area of Pomerania in eastern Germany. Caught in the dead of winter, several men, women and children load themselves and their belongings onto horse-drawn wagons to start their journey to safety. At one point, the group reaches a farm where everyone in the family has committed suicide, and at another juncture they are hiding in the basement of a house when some Soviet soldiers come to the door looking for refugees. The French POWs who were in the house try to send the soldiers away, but they fail -- the soldiers discover the refugees and are about to rape the women when the Soviet officer in charge prevents that atrocity. These and other stories of a fictional group of refugees were taken from real accounts at this time.