Giza, la niña de la maleta

The documentary tells the story of a Jewish family trying to survive in the Warsaw ghetto ruled by the Nazis. Their eight month old baby is suffering from a serious illness, which is why the family arranges for a clandestine Christian organisation – Zegota, to smuggle her out of the ghetto hidden in a suitcase. Little Giza will become Stefcia for the following seven years with her adoptive Christian family, involved in the resistance movement against the Nazis. Her stepfather will die in the Flossenbürg concentration camp, and her sister Danusia is one of the leaders of the movement, commanding a group of 100 men, out of whom 35 survive the Nazi attacks. After the war, Stefcia is handed over to her only living relatives – her aunt and uncle, which is when she discovers that her mother died in the Treblinka gas chamber and her father in Auschwitz, despite having resisted until the liberation of the camp. Her uncles will take her to Uruguay, where she will meet a part of her family which had managed to escape before the war. Now Stefcia is Giza again, but she never dares to ask and nobody ever mentions anything about her past life. At the same time, her former host family will attempt to find out about her state through letters sent to Montevideo, but Giza’s uncles will never let her read them. Due the silence of both sides, Giza will grow to believe that her former family never loved her.

After a research that lasted 65 years, Danusia’s daughter, Małgorzata, will discover her “aunt” Giza’s residence. After an incredibly emotional telephone conversation, a year later both sisters are reunited in Warsaw. Thus Giza recovers not only a lost part of her family but also the memories of the first 7 years of her life, which have very vague.