[2] She found him only years later, when he lived in Poland under the name of Eugeniusz Gruszczynski (after the war he was taken to an orphanage in Lower Silesia, where he was adopted by Polish educator Elena Grushinska) and was a student of the Szczecin polytechnic.

[3] It could also be inspired by a ten-minute documentary, Children of the Rams (Dzieci rampy, 1963), directed by Andrzej Piekutowski, showing among the survivors of Auschwitz a girl who found, several years after the war, her real parents in the Soviet Union.

Toward the end of the war, because of the Soviet offensive, Zina falls into the Marsh of Death, and when she leaves, she is horrified to see that the barrack in which her son is located is boarded up - the children are clearly going to kill.

She struggles to recover, settles in Leningrad, where she then starts working in a quality laboratory at a TV production plant, but does not give up trying to find Gena, because she is sure that he is alive.

She constantly sends inquiries to Poland to the Auschwitz Museum, when she learns that this organization actively helps in search of the missing children of the former prisoners of the camp.