This documentary opens with newsreel footage of concentration camp survivors arriving by boat in Sweden in 1945 – they are mostly women, smiling and waving at the camera. Director Magnus Gertten explains that he’s spent years trying to put names to the faces. One is a Dutch socialist and feminist who returned to Amsterdam after the war to her women’s health clinic; another a 16-year-old Jewish girl from Poland with a beautiful smile who does not yet know that she is the only survivor in her family. Finally, the face of a Chinese woman, not smiling, but fixing the camera with an intense stare.
This last is Nadine Hwang, born into privilege in Madrid, the daughter of China’s ambassador to Spain and a Belgian mother. The reason behind Nadine’s intense expression is that she does not yet know the fate of the woman she fell in love with at the Ravensbrück concentration camp: a French opera singer called Q. They were separated when Nelly was transferred to the Mauthausen camp.
