François is 21 and lives in a small country that has just been annexed by Nazi Germany. His father, a collaborator of the fascist regime, has forced him to attend the German university. But François has committed a first act of disobedience: he has left this place which professes racial hatred. Now he is faced with a Cornelian dilemma: become a “forced recruit” and leave for the Russian front to fight the Allies or become a “Refractory” and hide down a mine for months on end without seeing the sunlight, in the cold and damp, with the Liberation as his only hope.