In his first solo-directed feature, Kawalerowicz already broke with social realist tradition in his approach to the story of a village boy growing up during the period between the two wars. Radicalized by his experiences in a cellulose factory and in the military, he eventually joins the communist underground. Setting his protagonist in a neorealist panorama of Polish life, amid forces which he only slowly comes to understand, Kawalerowicz creates, not a model for correct behavior, but a multi-dimensional figure in whom historical truth and personal truths are effectively combined. It is thus that he becomes, as Richard Peña (The Film Center) notes, "a metaphor for the growth of revolutionary sentiment among the general populace."