Wedle wyroków twoich... (1984)

Twelve-year-old Ruth, who grew up in a small town in Poland, is to be shot in a forest along with her mother and other Jews after the Wehrmacht invades. Her mother manages to push her off the truck just in time, before being murdered herself a few minutes later. Ruth now begins an odyssey across Poland. First, she takes refuge with her aunt in the Warsaw Ghetto, which is soon sealed off by the Nazis and whose inhabitants are murdered. Ruth escapes death once again and finds shelter in an Ursuline convent. She spends a year there and, with the nuns’ support, learns about the Christian way of life. She assumes the identity of a Christian girl who, according to her alibi, is the daughter of an Italian woman. This is the only way to explain both her black hair and her “non-Aryan” appearance. When German soldiers search the convent and discover that the nuns are sheltering other Jewish children, the children are immediately deported; Ruth escapes once again. In a small Polish town, she meets Antek, who is her age and active in the resistance. He and his comrades derail German trains with explosives. During their flight, however, Ruth loses her coat, which soon falls into the hands of the German occupiers. Obersturmführer Knoch, who has made it his goal—as was customary in those days—to kill every Polish Jew and partisan, sets out to track down the coat’s owner. Ruth and Antek are arrested and, on Knoch’s orders, are to be shot at the Jewish cemetery along with other hostages. Knoch has no idea that one of his adjutants, Anna, is in fact Ruth’s aunt, who went into hiding before the massacre in the Warsaw Ghetto and joined the local Jewish resistance movement. At the last moment, Anna manages to help those condemned to death escape, though she risks her own life in doing so. Antek and Ruth try to paddle down a nearby river on a raft, but Antek is shot. A closing insert notes that the final events took place in August 1944 and that nothing is known about Ruth’s subsequent whereabouts.