As rumors reach them that the Allied armies are advancing on their concentration camp at Buchenwald, Polish prisoners renew their feeble hope for survival and freedom. When a group of prisoners is transferred from Auschwitz, a four-year-old child is smuggled into the camp in a valise. Born at Auschwitz, he is Jewish and will be killed if discovered. A group of prisoners decide to protect the child from the searching Germans, and although the kapos cannot smuggle the boy out of Buchenwald, they manage to hide him–moving from one place to another within the camp as the Nazis comb it. Threats and torture by SS men fail to turn up the boy who becomes a symbol of the struggle between captives and captors.

In his documentary film, Volker Koepp portrays the picturesque Polish region of Pomerania. But although the region appears to be idyllic, its inhabitants are struggling with big problems. The villages and cities of Pomerania that traditionally live from agriculture are hit by unemployment rates of up to 75% after the meltdown of the state farms. While most of the young people leave the region, some of them take their chances and start fresh – for instance, a young couple that tries to rebuild an agricultural farm with the help of EU funding. Furthermore, older inhabitants, including a spry 90-year old retiree from the Uckermark region who grew up in Pomerania, tell stories about the region′s eventful past.

This movie reflects on the situation around the border between Poland and Germany. The fate of many single characters creates a picture of life in this region: Some Ukrainians want to cross the border illegally to get into Germany, a company wants to build a new factory, a Polish taxi driver desperately needs money to buy his daughter a communion dress, and so on.

With Schattenland Volker Koepp and his long-time cameraman Thomas Plenert take us on a trip to the north-east of Poland to Masuria - probably the best known landscape of former East Prussia. Encounters with people who appear to be stranded away from the tourist areas of Masuria: farmers who use the short summers in the supposed idyll to wring grain from the barren soil. Ukrainians who were forcibly relocated after the Second World War and who moved to their old homeland after Poland's accession to the EU.

Arthur Lederman is 100 years old. Before World War II, he was a renowned concert violinist in his native Poland. In 1938, he escaped via steamship to New York City and was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust. Christoph Erbsloeh is a 20-year-old German cellist whose grandfather served in Hitler’s army. But when a Jewish aid agency sends the young exchange student to help the elderly recluse, Arthur and Christoph both begin to confront the legacy of Nazi Germany in ways neither had ever imagined.