A seventeen-year-old Jewish boy with a triangle patch on his jacket lies on the ground, having been hit by an explosion in Saxony in 1945. He knows it is May, the month he is supposed to turn eighteen, and he knows that he is dying. He thinks about how normally his family would light candles for the passing of loved ones, like they did for his Aunt Celina who died of a sudden sickness when he was in kindergarten, but as the war and Holocaust progressed, they stopped doing so. There would be no candle for him. He thinks about how, in his mind, the world used to be divided into Jews and non-Jews, rich and poor. When his family moved into an apartment where the Kutynskis, a non-Jewish family, also lived, his new blonde-haired, blue-eyed neighbor Ursula would skip rope, singing songs with antisemitic slurs. He thought about how, even as a young boy, he knew what such words meant.

In the same way, he also knew what the cook Mariya meant when she mumbled the word "Jewish" under her breath when he had asked what the pool of red blood was surrounding a dead fish that she was cooking. Now, as he is dying, Ursula Kutynski's horrible chant comes back to his mind every time he closes his eyes. He keeps his eyes open and thinks about how he imagines God, how he always has imagined him as an old man with a beard who looks like their neighbor. He knows it is a sin to imagine God, but he cannot help feeling that God must have a face when he prays to him. He says the prayer to himself that he would say in Hebrew before bed during his childhood, asking God to protect him and hold him in his hands while he sleeps. The boy passes out.

When he wakes up, a Polish girl who works for a German farmer is standing over him. He says he is dying, but she says that the farmer will care for him, that he will not die. She tells him the war is over now. The boy asks her name, and she replies, "Anna." She has blonde hair and blue eyes, but he can tell that she is Jewish, merely passing as a Gentile. He tells Anna that she has kind hands and closes his eyes.