A young female-thief, Lyubka, helps a criminal gang to steal a suitcase from a better-off Jewish family on a railway station; she often thinks about the well-dressed girl and dreams of swapping lives with her, living in comfort and care. Several years later, in 1952, fate again brings them together, when pregnant Irina, a young doctor, comes with her mother to a distant Ural city. The Irina's mother dies soon and Irina is forced to decide who'll care for her daughter, Sonya, while she's on duty in the hospital. And then she finds a wayward girl who'd just served her term. She is not like the other criminals.