Following the Nazi occupation of Poland, from the mud of a buried city, Jakob Beer, an orphaned Jewish boy, finds himself rescued by an unlikely saviour, the geologist and humanist Athos Roussos. Athos takes Jakob to his Greek-island home, where Jakob becomes his student. But the trauma of Jakob's early life refuses to leave him. Living forever in the shadow of the Holocaust, he must steel himself to excavate the horrors of his own history.