Sashka. A Soldier's Diary

Among the letters and photographs, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War finds his old diary. The aged man leafs through the diary, and the memories immediately send him back to the inferno of war. In the midst of fire, blood and dirt, in the midst of bestial hatred and enmity, he, then a young soldier Sashka, in a terrible battle with only his bare hands, takes a young German boy, like himself, prisoner. The German is waiting for death, but Sashka gives him his word that Russians do not shoot their prisoners. At the headquarters of the regiment, the battalion commander, whose friend in battle was killed in the shelling of the village in the morning, in anger orders to shoot the captured fascist. The Russian soldier faces a difficult choice.