The novel follows the life of the Jewish protagonist Jacob Heym in the ghetto of Łódź, Poland during the German occupation of World War II.

Jacob met an 8-year-old girl named Lina, whose parents were both killed and who is hidden from the Germans after escaping from the camp transport train.

While walking around the ghetto near the time of curfew, Jacob is suddenly stopped by a seemingly bored German officer on a patrol.

The officer pretends that the Jewish curfew of 8 pm has already passed, and sends the hapless Jacob to the police station.

Now that the neighbors believe he has a radio, he has to provide new items of fictional news each day in order to help maintain the peace and hope, and prevent despair from returning to the ghetto.

Striving to propagate some real news, he decides to steal a newspaper from an "Aryan water closet", which Jews are strictly prohibited from entering.

The next day Herschel Schtamm, a usually fearful and timid man, hears the voices of deportees coming out of a wagon.

Intent on giving them hope by telling them the news, he gathers his courage and approaches the wagon but is seen and shot by a watchman.

From another room where Lina can not see him, Jacob imitates the sounds of a radio-show, emulating the voice of Winston Churchill, telling her the metaphorical story of a princess who became ill because nobody could provide her a cloud.

It is ambiguous why Jacob was trying to escape: to save himself and abandon his people to their fate; or to get first-hand information about the course of the war and return to the ghetto, thus redeeming himself for the lie about the radio.

The novel also challenged East German literary norms by depicting fictitious events in World War II but without open resistance to Nazism.