The granddaughter of the resistance fighter Nelly Vos discovers her grandmother’s diary she kept whilst in captivity. It becomes a chance to learn who Nelly was, the battles she fought, the delicacy of her writing, and her love story with Nadine, whom she met in Ravensbrück.

In the early 2000s, Sylvie’s mother handed her a diary. It was the diary of her grandmother Nelly, a Belgian resistance fighter imprisoned in 1943 and later deported to the camps. The exchange took place quickly, too quickly, as if it were a secret. A few months later, Sylvie’s mother died. The diary was never opened and was put away in the attic at the bottom of a box.

Fifteen years later, filmmaker Magnus Gertten contacted Sylvie. He hoped to make a documentary about the love story between her grandmother and the Chinese spy Nadine Hwang, who had also been sent to Ravensbrück for resistance activities. In 2017, Sylvie finally opens the trunks hidden in the attic and finds a treasure: hundreds of perfectly preserved photographs, more than a thousand letters including correspondence with Carmen, Nelly’s companion during her imprisonment, her resistance card, the administrative papers from her deportation, and above all the diary itself, written in absolute secrecy in the Saint-Gilles prison, in Ravensbrück, and later in Mauthausen. In this text of remarkable literary power, Nelly recounts the pain of being separated from her daughters and the torment of life in the camps, but also the solidarity among prisoners, the improvised opera scenes between bunks, and of course Nadine. In the mud of the camps, a love like no other took root.

Sylvie Vos brings her grandmother’s sublime words to the world and reproduces in full the diary she kept during her captivity, along with selected pieces of her correspondence, the photographs and previously unseen archives, and in doing so draws a discreet and sensitive portrait of a woman with an exceptional destiny.

The long-awaited publication of Nelly Vos’s rediscovered diary following the release of the award-winning documentary Nelly & Nadine. A true and novelesque story, beginning with the extraordinary love between two women who risked their lives to fight the Nazi occupier. A vital testimony and a major literary work that captures daily life in the camp with striking poetry, accompanied by an extensive introduction by Sylvie Vos, presenting Nelly, Nadine, the context of their arrest, and their lives after the camps, along with scans of the photographs, letters, and documents that were found.