Love was born on Christmas Eve 1944 in one of the worst places imaginable: the Ravensbrück concentration camp designed by the Nazis exclusively for women. “A butterfly rises before me. Her black hair. Her ivory skin. Her slanted eyes. Nadine,” Nelly Mousset-Vos, a Belgian opera singer arrested in Paris in 1943 on charges of espionage, wrote of the moment in her diary.
The woman he is talking about is Nadine Hwang, who in the middle of Christmas carols asked him to sing Madame Butterfly. She was also imprisoned in Ravensbrück for her collaboration with the resistance. Nadine was born in Madrid, where her father was the Chinese ambassador, but she later returned to her country with her family and participated in various war conflicts, in which she rose to the rank of colonel. After living in several countries, he ended up settling in Paris. There, he evolved in a liberal environment and even had a relationship with the writer Natalie Barney, ahead of her time, openly lesbian and opposed to monogamy who organized a literary meeting in the Barney Room. Nadine, with very masculine features and manners because since she was little her parents – who wanted to have a son – dressed her like a boy, worked for her as a secretary and driver.
Shortly after the romance began, in the midst of barbarity, the Nazis transferred Nelly to Mauthausen, but his diary continued to record the love he felt for Nadine, whom he did not know if he would see again. In fact, the chances of getting out of this extermination camp alive were not great. It is estimated that between 90 and 100,000 people were killed there. Against all odds, both managed to survive.
Once released, the two women ended up in Brussels, where Nelly had left her two daughters behind when she was deported. And so they began a life together that took them to Caracas. Nadine worked as a secretary to the president of a bank and Nelly worked at the French embassy. They stayed there until Nadine fell ill and they returned to the Belgian capital.
At number 384 Chausée de Boondael, where both lived until the end of their days, a plaque in the name of Nelly Mousset-Vos was placed there on Thursday. Following the tradition of the project by artist Gunter Demnig, the so-called “Stolpersteine”, with which the memory of the victims of the Holocaust is honoured, are located at the last address where they lived before being deported. There are already more than 105,000 of them throughout Europe.
Sylvie Bianchi, Nelly’s granddaughter, returned to the place where she had such a good time. “We came to see her here in Brussels, on the second floor of this building, and she was making us waffles, she was knitting, she had her cat on her lap. And that’s the image I had of my grandmother,” she told several dozen people present at the event, including the ambassadors of Spain and Germany, friends and two groups of schoolchildren from the city who are still invited by the authorities of the municipality of Ixelles to place these plaques so that they can learn more about the horrors of the 20th century.
“We talked about everything, but not about that. Not about the concentration camps and homosexuality. That wasn’t said at that time. Also because of the trauma of my mother, who was abandoned for two years and then also because of what it meant at that time to have to share your mother with another woman,” Sylvie admits. She thought at the time that her grandmother and Nadine were friends, but she always knew there was something more.
A silent life
He only learned the real story a few years ago, when he dusted off the documents he had in the attic since his mother died twenty years ago. Shortly before her death, she had given him her grandmother’s diary, but she had not dared to read it until Swedish filmmaker Magnus Gertten contacted her to make a documentary about the couple. [Se puede ver gratuitamente aquí, en francés].
“Nelly defied all social conventions. She fell passionately in love with a man to whom she was married for 17 years. [se divorciaron años antes de la guerra]. He then lived a great passion for 25 years with a woman, Nadine. He never chose what was most comfortable. He absolutely had to do what his courageous temperament dictated to him. And that was to love, write and sing. These are the three things that helped him live and, above all, survive in the concentration camps,” recalls Sylvie, who admits to having found herself without asking “thousands” of questions to her grandmother and her mother.
Nelly died in 1987 and was buried in the Ixelles cemetery, where Nadine, who died 15 years earlier, also rests. She will also have a plaque, but in Madrid. This is what Isabel Martínez, Jesús Rodríguez and their daughter Aida, who promoted this initiative, decided. The family has been installing “Stolpersteine ” in Madrid for several years since they heard about the project on a trip to Freiburg (Germany). By autumn, they will have honoured 97 victims of fascism, including Nadine, whose plaque has however travelled with Nelly’s to Brussels to honour their love and memory in front of the house where they shared their last days.
