A middle-aged woman hovers anxiously in her idyllic French farmhouse kitchen, its table strewn with reams of yellowing papers. Among them is her grandmother’s diary: an account of her imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, first Ravensbrück, a female-only camp in Germany, and later Mauthausen in Austria. For 20 years, Sylvie Bianchi has been gathering the strength to read these pages. Now, she is finally ready to face this account of the horrors her grandmother survived.
The diary tells of how Nelly Mousset-Vos – an opera singer who Bianchi later discovers worked for a Belgian resistance network (she was not Jewish) – was arrested in Paris in 1943; “torn away from this world”. Her poeticism is startling: when it snows, the barbed wire encircling the camp appears to be “dusted with powdered sugar”. After spending five days in a cattle wagon packed so tightly with others that she cannot move, leaving her trapped amid the putrid stench of dysentery, she arrives at the “antechamber to hell” and falls asleep on the floor.
After the war, Mousset-Vos prepared a manuscript of her diaries but could not find a publisher. This documentary suggests that was because her writing was not only about life in the camps, but an account of her romantic love for Nadine Hwang: the woman she met in Ravensbrück and subsequently pined for until their 1947 reunion. Bianchi takes a while to realise that Nadine and Nelly were lovers – she thought she was simply a cohabiting friend – but soon she is unearthing Super 8 films and photographs and marvelling at her grandmother’s quietly radical postwar life.
This is a piece of social history unspooled via family secrets. But there is yet another framing device. Nelly and Nadine opens with footage of liberated German concentration camp survivors arriving in Sweden in 1945. One of them is Hwang, a bereft face amid the elation – something that drew the interest of this documentary’s director, Magnus Gertten, a man who has spent his career studying this archive film and tracking down the women shown (he has made two other films based on his discoveries: Harbour of Hope and Every Face Has a Name). The fact that Gertten has mined it elsewhere goes some way to explaining why this amazing footage barely features here: glimpses of the women themselves and the way civilisation swiftly reasserted itself – survivors are shown eating a formal lunch at a white-clothed table – are tantalisingly brief.
Another reason that Gertten doesn’t linger on this footage is because there is an awful lot going on in Nelly and Nadine. An account of the terror of the Holocaust becomes a tale of lesbian love and then a rare insight into the couple’s apparently clandestine social life – which also involved a gay couple, Jack and Raymond – after the women relocated to Venezuela, where they posed as cousins. This story is enmeshed with Bianchi’s conflicted feelings about her grandmother. It is implied that Bianchi’s mother, Nelly’s daughter, felt abandoned when she moved in with Nadine. This is all bookended again by the Swedish footage.
You can’t help but feel that some of the many leisurely shots of Bianchi looking consternated in her kitchen might better have been left on the cutting room floor. It would have freed up space to address unanswered questions: how did Nelly and Nadine find each other after the war? Why did they move to Venezuela? Was their queer social life confined to their apartment? Would they have been persecuted for their relationship? There is also relatively little information about the fascinating Hwang. Born in Spain to a Chinese diplomat father, she lived in Paris for a time as the lover of Natalie Clifford Barney, a lesbian host of avant garde literary salons, after an extraordinary career in the Chinese army that is barely mentioned here.
The jumbled timeline – jumping between appalling dispatches from the camps and giddy, drunken tomfoolery in South America – keeps any fierce emotional responses at bay. This feels very much like a film about somebody else’s memories. It’s difficult to know how to react: the film is keen to communicate the pair’s blissful happiness, but it doesn’t feel much like a celebration. Their secret sexuality and unspeakable experiences in the war loom ominously.
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There is one exception. In Ravensbrück, Hwang befriended a mother and daughter, Rachel and Irene Krausz-Fainman. Irene, who now lives in South Africa, speaks to Bianchi over Skype about how Hwang helped them escape the camp, a conversation that Gertten intersperses with footage of a young, recently rescued Irene grinning from ear to ear. Hwang made a request to her mother, says Irene, fending off tears: “If you survive and your little girl survives, and your little girl ever has a daughter, will you name her for me?” She then beckons over her now adult daughter, Nadine. It’s a small, simple, devastating, beautiful gut-punch of a story about love and memory, in a film that grapples with those themes in an interesting but rather unwieldy way.
