The film tells the story of twin German sisters Lotte (
Thekla Reuten) and Anna (
Nadja Uhl), who are separated when they are six. After the deaths of their parents, they are "divided" between quarreling distant relatives. Lotte grows up in a loving Jewish middle-class intellectual family in the Netherlands and Anna is raised in virtual servitude by a poor Catholic peasant family in a backward area of Germany where she is abused by her uncle. Despite their separation, the two girls seek to keep in contact, but Anna's family lacks Lotte's address, and Lotte's new family fails to mail her letters for fear that the brutal farmers will claim her as well. The cataclysmic events of
World War II sweep them even further apart. Lotte falls in love with a young Jewish man whom the Nazis eventually catch while they are in Amsterdam together and sent to an extermination camp where he is murdered. Anna falls in love and marries a young
Wehrmacht soldier who joins the
Waffen SS and is killed in the last days of the war. Although the girls find each other just before the outbreak of the war, Anna's attempt to reunite with Lotte in its aftermath is thwarted by Lotte's bitter discovery that Anna's husband had been part of Nazism which killed her fiancé in
Auschwitz. Only in old age, when they meet again at a spa, do they reconcile and put aside their divergent lives and reclaim the tender sibling feeling of her childhood. They spend one last night in the woods together, before Anna dies the next day. == Cast ==