In September, 1944, near the village of Hortiati in Macedonian Greece the death of a German soldier in an ambush by a guerrilla unit brought on a Wehrmacht retaliation that resulted in the massacre of one hundred and forty-six villagers, sixty-nine of whom were burned to death in the sealed village bakery, and the total destruction of the village. In this fictionalized account of the atrocity, an American journalist seeking to explore whether a now-prominent Austrian statesman played any part in what happened, records the testimony of five witnesses to the act: two villagers and three Wehrmacht officers.