Papilio

The German occupation deprived František Cepek of the chance to study at the Technical University right after his A levels. He must instead begin in a factory as an auxiliary worker. He experiences further misfortune with the unhappy ending of his affection towards his schoolmate Ema, who is arrested along with her parents. Another auxiliary worker Telc, nicknamed the Count - who is successful with women and gets by in every situation - makes a deep impression on the inexperienced youngster, even though he is in fact an unscrupulous man and a thief. František nevertheless joins his gang and participates in their visits to opulent villas where they steal scarce groceries and other things. One day, they rob the villa of Ema's parents, inhabited by a new factory director following the family's imprisonment. The Count begins calling František Papilio, after the Latin name of a prepared and preserved butterfly found in Ema's room. On its escape from the villa, the gang runs into the worker Kronďák and the man gets knocked out by one of Telc's cronies. The gang finds a list of members of the factory's resistance in his pocket. The list is seized by the Count who does not hand it over to the resistant fighters; he begins to blackmail them instead and thus loses František's approval. And as soon as František finds out that Count eventually denounced them all, he shoots him dead with his personally made gun.