Andrei Vukhov, a Russian Army Captain, stands alone before his judges. He tells of his ordeal of survival by cannibalism during a period of 60 days’ incarceration in the cellar of a deserted monastery in Southern Poland during the Second World War. Vukhov is a fiction; so, broadly, is the story he tells. Certain details, however, are factual, based on a brief description of the incident given by George Steiner in his book The Death of Tragedy.