Expelled from their secondary school in East Germany because of their rebellious attitudes, Hanna and Andreas plan to escape by swimming across the cold and choppy waters of the Baltic Sea in a harrowing twenty-five hour journey to freedom in West Germany--Hanna is an accomplished distance swimmer, Andreas is not, and the danger of being caught, drowning, or dying of exhaustion is very real, but the two teenagers are desperate to escape their lives in the East.