He dreamed of panning for gold and becoming happy. But gold is a yellow demon that always deceives a person. Katsap was no exception. Having become an unwitting witness to the robbery of a mine with the murder of the head of the artel, he is forced to flee from the pursuit of bandits. A trail of misfortune followed him, life constantly hung on the brink of death. In the colony, where fate had thrown him as a civilian foreman, the urks sentenced him to knives. The Motherland saved him from inevitable death by sending him to war in distant Mongolia. In the battles on the Khalkhin Gol River, he miraculously survived. But... the echo of the insidious yellow metal sends Katsap behind the barbed wire as a prisoner. How to survive in a death camp when the country is at war with fascism, and the wolf law rules in the zone?