Seven years before the Second World War, in a Stuttgart gymnasium, fate brings together the son of a Jewish doctor, Hans Schwartz, and a young aristocrat, Conradin von Hohenfels. Students see each other as like-minded people. But the current Nazi regime is splitting the world into two camps. Against the backdrop of the tragic events of history, the heroes are forced to forget about friendship. An extra man on German soil, Hans flees from Germany. Thirty years later, a Harvard graduate and respected lawyer, he will remember the country he was forced to leave, and the pain he had to endure in order to re-believe in the beauty and justice of the world, in reason and strength of spirit .Published in Russian for the first time.