Set during the First World War, Raphael (Wojciech Wysocki), is a young journalist with literary ambitions who is arrested and put in prison for publishing an Anti-clericalism magazine called "The Devil". There he is given a cell with a famous safecracker (Zdzislaw Wardejn) and Sixtus (Jan Peszek), a taciturn former monk charged with murder. The writer forms the idea for a novel based on the stories his cellmates share, however when he contracts typhoid fever it becomes hard for him to distinguish what is real and what is imaginary.