Jan Dite (John Child) is short in height, but high in ambition. To put it bluntly, the young provincial waiter wants to become a millionaire. And he knows just how to do it: by hearing everything, seeing everything, and using what he heard and saw. Armed with this knowledge and an irrepressible wish to please, he soon leaves his first place of employment, a pub, for a luxury brothel and, finally, an elegant Art Nouveau Prague restaurant. But by now it's the late 1930s, and things are changing: Hitler has taken the Sudetenland and is breaking apart Czechoslovakia. Jan falls in love with Lise, a Sudeten German proud of her Aryan blood. They marry, and when Lise returns from the front, she has a fortune in rare stamps that Jews had "left behind"... After her less than heroic death, Jan sells the stamps and becomes ... a millionaire. But he only has three years to enjoy his fortune: the new Communist regime puts him behind bars for 15 years, one for each of his millions... Upon his release from jail, Jan is sent to live in a decrepit border town that was abandoned by the Germans. Here he finally finds the leisure to think about the events that shaped his life - and to reflect on what might have happened if he had played a different role in these events...