Karl Markovics gives a memorable and most unusual performance as Salomon Sorowitsch, known as Sali, who is an accomplished and highly skillful forger. He is also a Jew, and he fakes passports to help people escape from Germany. When he is caught, he is sent to concentration camps, where he struggles to survive by any means possible. Sali looks out for himself in his daily battle against brutality, but he will lend a hand to other inmates when he can.

Markovics plays him with icy expression and a hard-bitten exterior. While in prison, he is recruited for the counterfeit project and given a staff of inmates to do the massive technical work involved. They are constantly under threat of execution if they fail. Thus working on the project is at least a temporary ticket to survival in an atmosphere where the cruel, Jew-hating personnel will beat or shoot someone upon a whim.

One inmate is intent on sabotaging the operation out of the principle of not helping the Nazis, and thus he is a threat to the survival of the others. In this situation the film raises the important human and moral issue of how far one can be justified in cooperating with the enemy as a means of staying alive, and what obligation does someone willing to sacrifice himself have toward others who are not.