Ilse Stanley, who prides herself on a photographic memory, clutters her album with too many stills and sentimental shots. After a successful career on the German stage, she plunged into rescue work with the Jewish leaders. A Nazi friend supplied Ilse with release papers, and posing as an official, she entered concentration camps 62 times to save Jewish victims. The machinery of these rescue missions and the heartbreak they entailed are remembered with agonizing freshness- but what follows is cloying and prolonged. Ilse settles in New York, finds true love after her unhappy marriage as a young actress, and launches campaigns towards forgiveness and reconstruction in post-war Germany. There is a constant struggle with poverty, a major brain operation without anaesthesia, and Ilse's appearance as star of the TV program This is Your Life. But she cannot resist over-developing these experiences and crowding them with bits of irrelevant or excessive sentiment.