Monica Reyes
An all-girl Catholic boarding school near Vienna for the wealthy Austrian elite and their children. The school is thriving, but faith is declining and the upper floors are deserted. The head of the institution, a young energetic nun, fights with ardor against this decline. Martha, 12, one of the nun’s favorite pupils, is a devoted girl who wishes to expiate the sins of the world. Encouraged by the nun, she is given a penance belt and taken to the abandoned upper floor.
According to the Swiss documentary filmmaker Richard Dindo (1944), the media want to make us believe that Swiss non-alignment during World War II was only a thin veneer around Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitic feelings. This stirred his interest in the story of Paul Grüninger, a Swiss policeman who in the late thirties provided false travel documents to hundreds of Jews who had fled from Austria.
