On the 8th of September 1943 Luigi Einaudi (1874-1961), future first president of the Italian Republic, abandoned Turin, which was occupied by the Wehrmacht, and went to Switzerland. It was “the flight of the people in the face of the barbarians”, he wrote in his “Diary of Exile”. Taking this as a starting point, the filmmaker Villi Hermann interviews those individuals still alive (Swiss and Italian, soldiers and partisans, Jews who were denied entry to Switzerland and survived the holocaust), who provide an account of this troubled period from an unusual perspective: Luigi Einaudi.