Titus & Alfonso

Marek, a small-time vaudeville performer, welcomes two children back from school to join their parents, who also work in vaudeville, in the deprived year of 1939. He gently tries to teach them about the deportation of their mother. Marek saves the life of his drunken father, who has destroyed his ventriloquist’s dummy in despair. Made up and costumed, he himself slips into their role and “throws” him the performance.

Some time later, in 1943, the year of the war, the two meet again. In a clinic, near Krakow, where the little boy apparently works, the ventriloquist performs on the occasion of a Christmas party. The children are also back, accompanying their father during the deprived war years.

Marek makes a mistake out of sheer shock and joy at the reunion – he spills a glass of champagne on the lap of the wife of a mysterious guest, which earns him the full wrath of the staff doctor. At dawn, he has the guards clear Marek’s room. But the soldiers find its bed empty. Despite the fact that they are following the ventriloquist’s truck, they cannot prevent him from paying Marek back for saving his life in the same way he did back then.

Marek hides in the children’s big teddy bear and is able to give a good turn to his destiny. Marek, the last remaining inmate of a former asylum for the handicapped, who was abused by the staff doctor to investigate the causes of short stature, thus escaped deportation to Auschwitz.