In 1945 a group of Polish mountaineers, the Blue Cross, accomplished the impossible: snaking back and forth across the snow–blocked Tatra Mountains, they ferried wounded Czech partisans through German lines and into a safe haven in Poland. Only a decade later, Munk recreated their adventures with a verisimilitude far beyond the usual demands of socialist realism; not only did he and his crew film in the same harsh, snowbound locations, he also cast several of the members of the Blue Cross as themselves. Munk threads a loose narrative and love–story subplot through the action, but wisely concentrates on the tools that reality offers him: the beauty and ferocity of the Tatra Mountains, and the faces of the individuals who, only years earlier, had lived the story. Lengthy, wordless sequences of the partisans skiing down vast slopes provide a strange serenity, while close–ups of proud, unbowed faces function as both social–realist gimmick and extratextual retort to their old enemy, taking over as they do a mountain–film genre the Germans themselves invented.