Nadine Hwan, who was born in Madrid because she was the daughter of the Chinese ambassador, and Nelly Mousset-Vos, a Belgian opera singer, arrived in Ravensbrück by different routes. But it was in that scenario beyond the inhospitable, known as the hell of women, where they shared laughter and kisses. They also left by different paths: Nelly was transferred to Mauthausen, while Nadine appeared among the 30,000 survivors who arrived at the port of Malmö (Sweden) on April 28, 1945.
Nils Jerring’s camera captured her for a newsreel, among dozens of faces as anonymous as they were smiling, savoring freedom. Nadine is the one who appears most serious, barely a smirk of victory over the Nazi death appears on her lips. “He is thinking of Nelly: at that moment she could not know if she was alive or dead,” speculates Marcus Gertten, director of Nelly.
Nelly
The daunting task that Gertten set for himself, without even being fully aware of it, was to name all those faces. “When I finished the first documentary, I wasn’t thinking of making a second, but there are already 70 faces that we have identified,” he confesses. “Last week a woman wrote me saying that she had recognized her mother seeing Nelly
It is not very clear why the Germans arrested Nadine, but it is almost certain that she was involved in the passage of Spanish fugitives to France.
Indeed, Nadine grew up in Madrid, like her famous sister Marcella, who became Franco’s interpreter and worked for three decades in our Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Both of them Spanishized the name, Nadine and Marcella De Juan, perhaps because her father, a fan of bullfighting, was known as Juanito, the Chinese bullfighter. It is said that the man wanted a boy, and he dressed Nadine as a matador as a child.
In any case, she chose to go to China, where “she was part of high society, which allowed her to do things that no other woman in the country could do, such as driving, learning languages, studying law, working for one of the ministers of the country, and even wear the colonel’s uniform, although it is not very clear if it was only an honorary position”, explains Gertten.
But he decided to return to Europe, to Paris, to be able to experience his sexuality, something that was impossible in China. In France she became Natalie Barney’s chauffeur and lover. This writer would also deserve her own film: she founded a Women’s Academy in reaction to the official one, which didn’t admit a female writer until 1980, with the entry of Marguerite Yourcenar. Whose great love of hers, by the way, was the American Grace Frick.
It is not very well known how they met again, they had to exchange their addresses in the field
“It is not very clear why the Germans detained Nadine, but it is almost certain that she was involved in an organization that operated in San Juan de Luz, to transfer fugitives to the other side of the Spanish border,” the director clarifies.
The story of Mousset-Vos, whose journals and home movies have made Nelly possible
Nelly
“For me it has been a blessing to discover this love story, because documentarians are always telling brutal and terrible stories,” says Gertten. “This story is very inspiring, especially in times as dark as the present.”
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
