Romania 1945. 17-year-old German Leopold Auerberg from Transylvania is deported to a Soviet forced labor camp for five whole years. Initially, wanting to escape the suffocating grip of his family and the small town where he lives, forced to hide his homosexuality, the idea of being deported does not scare him at all - quite the opposite. However, he will soon be confronted with the ruthless reality of the camp, where the degrading working conditions and the humiliating daily struggle for survival will mark his soul and accompany him for the rest of his life. The experiences of harsh, relentless hunger, egocentrism, vulgarity, and loneliness require a special language, a language that can describe the uniqueness of such a situation.

Herta Müller, with great linguistic skill and power, with a style full of images, metaphors, and innuendos, with a language purely allegorical, often describes the indescribable. Inventing words and unfamiliar linguistic structures, often transforming prose into poetry, she manages to convey the inhuman and gloomy life of those people who found themselves in the forced labor camps at that time.