Storyville: Nelly and Nadine—Ravensbruck, 1944, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Director Magnus Gertten.

Storyville: Nelly and Nadine—Ravensbruck, 1944, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, Director Magnus Gertten.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001lczg/storyville-nelly-and-nadine-ravensbruck-1944

Holocaust literature regularly tops the bestselling lists. Yet the story of Nadine Hwang, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Spain, who fell in love with opera singer Nelly Mousset Vos on Christmas day, 1944, in Ravensbruck, a Nazi’s women’s concentration camp, couldn’t find a publisher. Siemens operated a factory from its premises. A perfect competition model of a free-enterprise zone. No rules or regulations. Labour was provided by mastermind of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler and the SS at minimal cost paid directly to his agency staff. The SS guards provided accommodation, a uniform and food. Babies were placed head to toe in the Kinderzimmer in Block 11 and starved to death. The sunniest place was behind the delousing block. By the end of 1944, Ravensbruck was so overcrowded, women arrived dressed in straw and there was nowhere to put them. Little or nothing to eat.

With the war ending, and the Allies closing in, inmates in Ravenbruck were moved to other camps. For many this meant a Death March.  Nelly Mousset Vos was packed into a cattle truck in which 17 died. She was taken to another concentration camp in Austria, Mauthausen. She counted the stone steps carved out of rock she had to walk up, and so many prisoners were thrown down to their deaths. Unloading a train, she heard the click of the guard’s gun as he prepared to shoot her, because she couldn’t go on, but did. She survived and was liberated and taken to Malmo in Sweden to recuperate by the Red Cross.

Nelly & Nadine set up home in Caracas in Venezuela. Nelly left behind her two children in France. Both women died in 1972. Their story is framed by Nelly’s diaries and Super-8 films of her exile in Caracas ex-pat and gay community, she bequeathed to her granddaughter, Sylvie Blanchi, married to a Belgian farmer.