August 1944, a small village in the Austrian Tyrol. With some reluctance, a teenage boy’s family takes into hiding a Jewish doctor who saved the boy's life before the war. The boy (Niki), now 15 and in the Hitler Youth, is appalled by the idea, as is his frightened mother, but the father insists. A friendship gradually develops between the boy and Doctor Weiss, the 'man in the box’, who has to open his eyes, amid the ever-present dangers of discovery and exposure.