The most impactful parts of Nelly & Nadine can be attributed to excerpts from Mousset-Vos’ extraordinary wartime diaries. Alive with vivid detail, her writings transport the viewer to every sight, smell and anxiety of living in hell on Earth. She is blunt and unflinching when it comes to conveying the true torments of concentration camp incarceration. The directness of her writing is often devastating in its simplicity. “17 women are dead,” she writes at the end of a hellish five-day train journey. “And a baby was born.”

At one point, after being transferred from Ravensbrück, Mousset-Vos describes her new location thusly:

At the top, crowning the mountain, lies the camp. Mauthausen, the antechamber of hell. We climb down a giant 186-step staircase carved into the rock. It’s the quarry. Our tomb. The air smells of typhus and corpses. You have to fight for a morsel of moldy bread, a sip of water, a place to sleep. A woman lets out a long cry of agony that sounds like a cry of pleasure. How to find the courage to survive?

Mousset-Vos’ writings make plain how the love of Hwang helped her to endure the unimaginable. She wrote of briefly snatched moments of joy when the pair could share measly bread rations and deep conversations. “I find myself looking out for her black hair beneath white scarf,” Mousset-Vos wrote shortly after meeting Hwang, “and her eyes that light up when they see me.”

At the end of the war, having both somehow made it out alive, the two corresponded by postcard and letter for a few years before they could be reunited. Once they were, they built a life together in Venezuela — a location chosen to help them erase their memories of the war. Old friends are interviewed in Nelly & Nadine about the life Hwang and Mousset-Vos shared there, a life well lived and thoroughly enjoyed. It is clear that the couple gave each other — and their friends — permission to live any way they pleased. After what they endured in the war, there was simply no other way to move forward.

Nelly & Nadine is a layered story, richly told. Yes, it offers a new telling of the war from the perspective of a supremely talented writer. And, yes, it speaks to family lineage and the legacies we leave behind. It is about the importance of finding cracks of light in relentless darkness. But above all else, it is a story of magnificent, beautiful LGBTQ love; love that was life-saving first and life-affirming later; love that was embraced and nurtured and valued above all else. And while some of the details in it have the power to devastate, the hope in Nelly & Nadine shines brighter than everything else. Something that very much reflects the relationship it’s about.

‘Nellie & Nadine’ begins streaming on June 6, 2023, and is available via Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu and Wolfe On Demand.

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In ‘Nelly & Nadine,’ Two Women in Love Survive WWII’s Horrors