Andy Jefferson is a college student and part-time photographer for his father's newspaper. But it is 1942 and he faces the military draft, so he joins the Air Force. There, his photographic skill and top physical condition propel him into flying photo missions over Germany. When German fighters set fire to his plane, he parachutes safely, but is forced to shoot an enraged, German civilian bent on killing him. For this, he is considered a terrorist, to be shot on sight. Army units pursue him through forests for days until a German woman shelters him. But her husband, an officer in Hitler's brutal SS, surprises them and sends Andy to the dreaded death camp at Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland. There, he is beaten and starved while he sees thousands of people murdered in gas chambers. When he is slated for a gas chamber, it is either die, or escape from an escape-proof prison and flee all the way across Germany to somehow reach England.