Synopsis

Berlin, February 1928, a young woman, Olga Benário, spectacularly invades the impenetrable prison of Moabit and frees the “red” professor Otto Braun, accused of betraying the country.

Olga, German, was the daughter of Leo Benario, a lawyer from Munich and an extremely influential man in the Social Democratic Party during the Weimar Republic and Eugénie Gutman Benario, socialite from a very wealthy Jewish family. At 15, she began militating in the Communist Youth Movement and was known for her fearless, physical courage.

Wanted by the German police, Olga has to escape to the Soviet Union. There, she receives military training, and is designeted for the most important Komintern mission in Latin America. She is to be responsible for the personal safety of the mythic Brazilian revolutionary Captain Luis Carlos Prestes who, together with his tiny army, traveled, on horse back, from one side of his country to the other combating poverty and oppression. Pursued, Prestes had to escape to the Soviet Union. Now he has to return to command the first communist uprising in the South American continent, the Brazilian Revolution of 1935.

On a risky trip through Europe and the United States and forced to pretend to be a rich Portuguese couple, Prestes and Olga fall in love. The experienced and disciplined 37 year old soldier reveals himself to be a very shy person and confesses that he had never before been with a woman.

In Brazil, Prestes and Olga meet other envoys from the Komintern and, clandestinely, organize the insurrection. In and between the secret meetings and the fear of being discovered by the police, Olga tries to understand this strange country, with its strong colors, sun, music and disconcerting gaiety. For a few moments, she even begins to believe that this could be paradise, the perfect country.

However, the movement is tragically defeated. All the revolutionaries are crushed by the dictator Getulio Vargas’ police. Many are arrested and many others are killed.

Olga and Prestes manage to escape and live in hiding for several weeks, for they are searched for by all the political police of Rio de Janeiro. In the early morning of march 5, 1936, the police find the fugitives. The order is to kill Prestes, however, Olga’s desperate gesture, running in between the elite riflemen and her lover’s body, saves him from being murdered.

Both are imprisoned. Alone in her cell, unable to communicate with anybody and at the disposal of Vargas’ violent police, Olga discovers that she is expecting Prestes’ baby. Delighted, she still dreams of the possibility of freedom and union with him. However, after just a few days, Vargas strikes the final blow against the movement and its main leader by deporting Olga to Hitler’s Germany.

At 15 Barnimstrasse, in Berlin, the fearful Gestapo women’s prison, Olga gives birth to her only daughter, Anita Leocádia. Suddenly, she finds herself full of peculiar feelings that she had never before known she had. She becomes an loving and caring mother, that tries to amuse her daughter within the grimy walls of her cell. For the first time in her life, Olga is scared, for she knows that once she stops nursing her baby, she will be taken away from her.

At fourteen months, Anita is grabbed from her arms. However, an international campaign began by the tireless efforts of her mother-in-law, (Olga’s own mother refuses to do anything about it) saves the child who is given to the family to care. Nevertheless, believing that her daughter had been placed in a nazi detention house and distraught with pain, Olga stops eating completely and loses all energy, even to get out of bed. She recalls the tenderness she had found in the warmth of her baby’s tiny hands and wants to die.

Slowly, it is the hope of seeing Prestes and her daughter again some day that leads Olga to continue her fight. Transferred to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, she decides to organize and guide her fellow inmates. Together they try to survive the starvation, the madness and the violence.

At that exact moment, the great Stalinist terror is already fully underway. Almost all Olga’s companions in Soviet Union, are arrested and killed. In 1939, after the non aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin, there are maneuvers to free Olga, but they are ignored by the Soviet government.

Olga is never to see Prestes nor her daughter again. She is one of the first victim’s of the nazi final solution. She is killed in a Bernburg gas chamber in 1942. Luis Carlos Prestes is released in 1945, when the Vargas government is deposed. Anita Leocádia is alive and today lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Olga’s story is the reflection of an era of obscurity and terror, it is Hitler’s, Mussolini’s and Stalin’s era. It is the fascinating and disturbing portrayal of a woman that believed she could illuminate the world with her dreams, her courage and even with her death.

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