Like Fred Zinnemann’s The Search, this movie is as much a record of its location as it is a first of its kind of storytelling. Filmed in Auschwitz only 15 years after its liberation this movie in many ways invents (and subverts) the very concept of what audiences would come to know as a Holocaust film.
— Jake Paltrow

In this unfinished film from director Andrzej Munk, Liza (Aleksandra Slaska) is a woman whose past is reawakened when she recognizes Marta (Anna Ciepielewska), a fellow passenger on an ocean liner. Liza, a former concentration camp guard, gives her husband a distorted version of her relationship with the woman, who had been her prisoner at Auschwitz. Eventually however, as brutal scenes of the prison camp are reenacted in flashbacks, Liza’s cruelty and Marta’s courage become more clear.