Olga Benario and Luiz Carlos Prestes:
At the end of 1936, when she was pregnant and involved in failed rebellion in Brazil, the German Comintern agent of Jewish origin, Olga Benario, was extradited to the Nazi terror regime. In the Berlin women's prison at Barnimstrasse she gives birth to their mutual child, Anita Leocádia, who is taken away from her after fourteen months. Against all odds the child is given to Luiz Carlos Prestes' mother, Leocádia Prestes, who had been travelling to Berlin. She saves the child by taking it to Mexico.
The chilean Poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda dedicates his poem „Dura Elegia“ („Tough Elegy“) to Leocádia Prestes and recites it at her funeral in Mexico City on June 14th 1943.
Olga Benario spent almost three years at the women's concentration camp in Ravensbrück when in April 1942 - the exact date is unknown - she is put to death by the Nazis in the gas chamber at the mental institution in Bernburg, south of Berlin.
Olga Benario’s life companion and father of her child, the Brazilian officer and revolutionist Luiz Carlos Prestes, had already been leading a military unit rebelling against the Brazilian oligarchy in the middle of the 1920s and was known as „The Knight of hope“. After the rebellion against the Vargas government - led by him - failed in 1935, he spent nine years in solitary confinement in a prison in Rio de Janeiro.
The two prisoners managed to maintain their correspondence in spite of serious difficulties, such as the distance, the language and censorship. The focus of their letters deals with the fate of their mutual daughter Anita.
At the end of 1936, when she was pregnant and involved in failed rebellion in Brazil, the German Comintern agent of Jewish origin, Olga Benario, was extradited to the Nazi terror regime. In the Berlin women's prison at Barnimstrasse she gives birth to their mutual child, Anita Leocádia, who is taken away from her after fourteen months. Against all odds the child is given to Luiz Carlos Prestes' mother, Leocádia Prestes, who had been travelling to Berlin. She saves the child by taking it to Mexico.
The chilean Poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda dedicates his poem „Dura Elegia“ („Tough Elegy“) to Leocádia Prestes and recites it at her funeral in Mexico City on June 14th 1943.
Olga Benario spent almost three years at the women's concentration camp in Ravensbrück when in April 1942 - the exact date is unknown - she is put to death by the Nazis in the gas chamber at the mental institution in Bernburg, south of Berlin.
Olga Benario’s life companion and father of her child, the Brazilian officer and revolutionist Luiz Carlos Prestes, had already been leading a military unit rebelling against the Brazilian oligarchy in the middle of the 1920s and was known as „The Knight of hope“. After the rebellion against the Vargas government - led by him - failed in 1935, he spent nine years in solitary confinement in a prison in Rio de Janeiro.
The two prisoners managed to maintain their correspondence in spite of serious difficulties, such as the distance, the language and censorship. The focus of their letters deals with the fate of their mutual daughter Anita.