When Holocaust survivor, Maria, and disturbed teenager, Shelby, battle their own traumas in Mackenzie Ward at Madison County’s Main Hospital, will the two strangers finally be able to discover the true value of family and healing?

*Script Available Upon Request

SYNOPSIS:

Two strangers...Two different traumas...One heart....

More than sixty years later in Madison County, Mississippi, Maria is still riddled with nightmares of the horrors of the Holocaust. A shrieking ambulance siren penetrates the early hours of the morning, adding to Maria’s distress, after she awakes from reliving a repetitive memory at the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration Camp, South Poland, 1943.

The sound of screeching tyres collides with dark shadows that merge with a bleak graffiti-covered building, where the residents who grow up in the Projects, fight to survive another day. Paramedics call a code-red when fourteen-year old Shelby returns home to discover her six-year old sister, Sienna, lying dead in the doorway of their apartment.

Maria, who is prone to pneumonia, has already spent a night at Mackenzie Ward, Main Hospital, when Shelby is wheeled into her room. She is heartbroken, as she watches Shelby’s reaction, when Doctor Crawford tells the teenager details of her mother and baby sister’s deaths. Shelby stands in her conviction that, although her father Evan did not pull the trigger, he has blood on his hands.

Maria had to survive Hitler's rules and abide by His law. Shelby had to survive without the help of any law, and abide by unspoken rules. Marie comes to understand that they share the same heartache in the aftermath of trauma. – Two different traumas; yet, not so different – Occurring in two different spaces in time...Causing two different hearts to break on two different days...In exactly the same way...With the same destructive aftermath...Of incomprehensible damage, self-destructive behaviours, and limiting beliefs.

Maria stands steadfastly by Shelby fighting social service jurisdictions, and Shelby eagerly listens to the inhumane atrocities of the Holocaust, and together they embark on a new healing journey of rediscovery, forgiveness and unconditional love.

Their unbreakable bond soars beyond limits to warm hearts, and Maria is granted custody of Shelby, so that she is not led to the slaughter under her father’s care, or flung into more unsettling ‘unknown’ with a foster family in Louisiana.

Nurse Jenny organises a surprise party in the Garden of Remembrance, before Maria and Shelby are discharged, where staff and patients pay tribute and respect to all those who lost their lives in the Holocaust...To all those who never got to leave The Projects....And to all those who survived, but who's lives were forever altered.

Shelby is given a second chance at life, thanks to Maria. It’s her first time in a proper neighborhood...In a proper home...With a proper bedroom...And proper love, but Evan will stop at nothing to end Shelby’s happiness.

He breaks into Maria’s home, and Shelby is left in a critical condition, fighting for her life. Three weeks later she wakes up in hospital to learn that Maria did not make it. She sacrificed her life to give Shelby her heart.

Sometimes a stranger becomes a friend, who touches your heart so profoundly, that it brings you back to life. Love resuscitates!