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.
