Marter der Liebe (1928)

Russia in revolutionary times. While fleeing the Bolshevik troops who have shot her aristocratic husband, Marja Suminska loses her young son. As the sleigh races along under shellfire, he falls off and lands unharmed in a shell crater. Ever since, she has been desperately searching for him. One day, she learns that other refugees may have taken the little boy westward to Paris. With her last bit of money, Marja sets off for Paris to look for her child. She does find a boy, but to her horror realizes that he is not her son. In despair, Marja tries to take her own life and throws herself into a canal. A passing painter sees what is happening and pulls the Russian exile from the water. The man, Bruno Bronek, takes the freezing woman home and gives her shelter. Hoping to distract her, Bruno takes Marja to an artists’ party in the days that follow. At the event, a masked man approaches Marja and cryptically tells her that he knows something about her missing child. Marja does not know that beneath the mask is an officer whose advances she once rejected back in Russia. The man, Pierre, claims that he picked up the boy after he fell from the sleigh and took him in. Now he demands nothing less than Marja’s affection in exchange for telling her where her son is. The stranger cleverly lures Marja to his apartment, intending to assault her there. But Bruno and his fellow artists Viktor and Robert prevent the worst and force the address of Marja’s son’s location—a farm—out of the brute. The son is said to be in Poland, so Marja and Bruno set off at once. But Pierre takes a plane, gets there ahead of them, and flees with the boy. A hair-raising chase through a wintry landscape follows. The kidnapper’s sleigh breaks through the ice on a frozen lake, a border lake between free Poland and Bolshevik Russia, and he drowns. Bruno manages to save the boy at the last moment and return him to his mother.