Franz and Inga Hartl (Armin Dahlen, Cornell Borchers) have brought up Toni (Michel Ray), who they believe to be a war orphan, as their own child; he is ten years old when two officials from the International Refugee Organization visit them with the news that his actual mother Sonja (Yvonne Mitchell), a Yugoslavian woman, is alive and desperately wants him back. This heart-breaking drama between two women that both call Toni their son is based on a true story of a child, whose mother was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp and, like 300 other babies and young children from Slovenia who were deemed “racially worthy”, was sent to Germany and adopted in a Nazi program known as Lebensborn. Widely admired on its release THE DIVIDED HEART won three British Academy Film Awards.

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