When the movie opens, the owner of the town bookstore is placing a comical maquette in his shop window, featuring photos of students who are soon to graduate from the local high school as well as a photo of their elderly Latin teacher, Professor Málek (played by František Smolík), as he points to the words "Higher Principle," the nickname that the students have given him on account of his frequent quotation of Seneca's moral precepts.
Teachers at the high school and its director worry that the episode will get them in trouble with the local Gestapo, but the students don't take it seriously, and in fact, when one notices a photo of Heydrich in the newspaper that his open-faced sandwich came wrapped in, he and a friend ink a comical mustache and beard onto the portrait.
Zajíček's father, played by a young Rudolf Hrušinský, happens to be in a relationship with a secretary at the town's Gestapo headquarters, and his shoestore is going bankrupt, giving him a motive for collaboration.
At a meeting of the school's teachers, Professor Málek reads aloud a passage from Seneca that seems dangerously appropriate to the times, and to the relief of his fellow teachers, he says that he won't be assigning it as the text for the students' final Latin exam, but will instead be choosing a passage in Tacitus about a man who protested injustice with a hunger strike.
In a final scene, at the school, the German teacher, eager to curry favor with the Nazis, insists that Málek deliver a lecture warning his students against the mockery of Heydrich committed by their late classmates.