- Norwegian journalist Gerda Grepp recalls from her deathbed about her experience in Spanish Civil War, ten years ago. The facts she witnessed in Malaga, in February 1937, are still beating in her soul, as it proves to have been the announcement to what Europe would suffer in WW2.
- While Norway is being invaded by the German army, Gerda Grepp remembers her exploits as a photo reporter in the Spanish Civil War and, in particular, the days she spent in Malaga before the city was conquered by the Francoist army. Two men helped her during the siege: the Hungarian writer and journalist Arthur Koestler and Scottish aristocrat Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, who welcomes them to his villa while the world they have come to witness collapses.
- From her native Norway, photographer Gerda Grepp recalls the days she spent in Malaga before the city fall in February 1937 at the hands of the rebel army. She had arrived in Madrid in autumn 1936, brave and naive, soon seduced by writer and journalist Arthur Koestler with whom she openly declared herself a friend. The atmosphere of the Spanish capital fascinates him, but Gerda wants to get to know the war from a closer look.
In Madrid, poet W.H. Auden and Ludwig Renn, also a writer after his experience in WW1, then activist and now colonel in the International Brigades, provide them with passes to visit the front. In Malaga they are already playing all or nothing. General Queipo de Llano's troops advance thanks to the military support that Mussolini has sent to Cádiz: artillery, tanks and 3,000 soldiers whose columns march on all possible routes towards the capital.
Grepp and Koestler travel from Valencia and, although it is still hard for her to admit, in Malaga she unmasks her lover, a secret agent of the Kom. With her she plunges into a demoralized city, without defenses or supplies, abandoned by the government and, finally, by its own leaders who are going to let a mass of population and refugees leave in disarray.
From the haze of her memories emerge several characters, that of Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell, an elderly Scottish aristocrat, honorary consul of Great Britain in Malaga, who refuses to leave the city and brings to Gerda hope, humanity and a proper dinner in the bleak panorama of an open city. Also the faces of children, militiamen and women whose images Gerda now develops in her photo laboratory and who are the real protagonists of the chronicles that she was sending to Oslo to be published in the laborist newspaper that her mother ran.
It was announced that Malaga would fall and she, who had chosen to be in the front row, cowered and decided to leave the city and Koestler in it. In her flight she coincided with the thousands of refugees who made up that cursed disbandment. Malaga was just the beginning. Few wanted to admit it, and even she herself, now on her deathbed, realizes that her body was trapped there, by that tuberculosis that bound her, forever, to Spain.
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