A girl named Lola tells about her time living in a dorm with five other girls. All the girls are college students. Lola tells in her diary that she is disturbed by the totalitarian state. She finds her solace in unpleasant, anonymous sex with forceful men on the bus. She joins the Communist Party before hanging herself in the closet in the house.
Because the suicide seemed to reflect badly on the Communist Party, the university calls an assembly to publicly denounce Lola as a public enemy and a traitor. The narrator lends her diary to some friends, and they read her story. All the people who know Lola are interested in rebellion, and they often carry books and sing songs that are explicitly forbidden by their government. They receive angry letters from home about their bad behavior.
We learn that the four remaining girls are all children of Nazi SS officers.
One day, a Securitate named Captain Pjele becomes suspicious of the girls, and he begins regularly interrogating them. Their belongings are searched, but ultimately, no offenses are discovered (They hid their illegal objects in a spare summer home). The girls graduate and head their separate ways.
Kurt works in a slaughterhouse after college, where he starts as supervisor. The narrator tells that she took a job translating instruction manuals for a factory. Tereza and the narrator are friends, but the narrator can clearly tell that Tereza is working with Pjele on some sort of sting operation.
When the kids eventually decide to leave the country as refugees, Georg is the first to go. He is found dead in Frankfurt; another alleged suicide. Kurt is later discovered hanged.
