Ashes and Diamonds takes us to a provincial town in the spring of 1945. The nation is in the throes of transformation to People's Poland. Communists, socialists, and nationalists; thieves and black marketeers; servants and fading aristocrats; veteran soldiers and bands of murderous children bewitched by the lure of crime and adventure--all these converge on the town's chief hotel, a microcosm of an uprooted world.