A 20 year old Dutchman joins the Italian Resistance to the Nazi occupation of Northern Italy. As a courier for the underground headquarters of the partisan movement he is captured by the Gestapo who find on him military intelligence documents for transmission to Allied headquarters in Southern Italy. He is deported to the notorious Nazi extermination camp of Mauthausen in Austria. In a daring nighttime escape from the cattle train speeding through icy snowbound mountains he goes on to survive by the skin of his teeth in heart stopping encounters with enemy soldiers and policemen. At war's end...