When Otto Dov Kulka was 11 years old and had to start the death march from Auschwitz to Groß-Rosen, he saw a prisoner lying with a broken leg on the orders of the defendant Baretzki who then probably shot him. Unlike this unknown prisoner, Kulka managed to escape death. Nineteen years later, he testified alongside 210 other Auschwitz survivors against 20 indicted former SS officials, participating in a trial that confronted the German people with their past and gave voice to silence.

He became a beacon of hope for thousands of children and a lifesaver for hundreds: the Jewish German Fredy Hirsch. Director Winfried Laasch takes a look at one of the last mysteries of the Holocaust. As a boy scout, Fredy Hirsch took care of those who were most helpless in the face of Nazi reprisals from an early age: Jewish children and young people. First in Düsseldorf, later in Prague, then in the Theresienstadt ghetto and finally in Auschwitz.