Life is fiction, set in Munich in 1940 when a young researcher is honored by the German government for his work on eugenics. He is sent to a concentration camp with other researchers to do tests on the prisoners, but after witnessing how they are treated and then discarded, he goes around the prison officials to save many of them. The story ends after the 1947 Nuremburg Trials when he is acquitted and becomes a teacher at his old school.