At Yad Vashem, embroidered into a scrap of red cloth cut from a Nazi flag, there is a Chinese signature: 黄China — “Hwang China.” Most visitors walk past it. The display window partly obscures the name. But that signature, stitched by a Chinese prisoner in the final days of Ravensbrück concentration camp in April 1945, opens a door onto one of the strangest and most forgotten lives of the twentieth century.
On this Yom HaShoah, her name deserves to be spoken: Nadine Hwang (黄娜汀).
A life that shouldn’t have been possible#
Nadine Hwang was born in Madrid in 1902 to a Chinese diplomat father and a Belgian mother. Her sister, Marcela de Juan, became a respected writer and translator. Nadine herself trained as a lawyer — and then, in 1929, was commissioned as a lieutenant (later described in Spanish newspapers as an aviation colonel) in the Chinese army under the “Young Marshal” Chang Hsueh-liang. She served briefly in Beijing’s Beiyang government as confidential secretarial staff to Prime Minister Pan Fu.
She rode horses and drove cars when almost no Chinese woman did either. She flew planes. She played polo, cricket, and ice hockey. She dressed in men’s uniforms. Friends in China described her as both beautiful and “piratical” — the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi met her in 1930 and never forgot her.
By 1933, frustrated with the political upheavals of Republican China and the looming threat of Imperial Japan, she left for Paris.
The salon years#
In Paris she entered the orbit of Natalie Clifford Barney, the American heiress whose literary salon gathered the Lost Generation and much of interwar European modernism. Hwang became Barney’s lover, chauffeur, secretary, and personal assistant. British biographer Diana Souhami describes her simply as a “new lover… who had been a colonel in the Chinese army.”
The salon was not a refuge. Hwang reportedly endured “suffocating racism” because she was Chinese, and navigated bitter jealousies among Barney’s other lovers. But more importantly — and only recently documented — she was also working as an agent for the French Resistance.
Ravensbrück#
In May 1944 the Gestapo arrested her and sent her to Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women, 90 kilometres north of Berlin. Yad Vashem estimates that of 130,000 women interned there, around 92,000 died. Hwang was assigned to the Siemenskommando, forced labor building V-2 rocket parts for Siemens & Halske.
This is a history Chinese historiography has largely ignored. Between 1933 and 1945 the Nazis liquidated the Chinese quarter of Hamburg and the Chinese communities of Berlin and Bremen. Chinese prisoners were held at Mauthausen, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz. Zhu Min — daughter of Communist China’s top marshal Zhu De — was deported from a Belarusian school to a Nazi camp in 1941 at age seven; she survived four years of torture and lifelong injuries.
The name she left behind#
Inside Ravensbrück, Hwang met a Jewish inmate named Irene Krausz and her mother Rachel. Through Mary Lindell — a captured British spy organising rescues from inside the camp — Hwang helped place Irene and Rachel on the list for the White Buses operation of April 1945, the Swedish Red Cross rescue that pulled thousands from Ravensbrück in its final days.
Rachel made Hwang a promise: if her daughter Irene ever had a daughter, she would be named Nadine.
Irene survived. She lived briefly on a kibbutz in Israel, then moved to South Africa, married, and had a daughter. The daughter was named Nadine.
Yad Vashem has not recognised Nadine Hwang as Righteous Among the Nations. But a Jewish girl carries her name because of a promise made in one of the darkest places the world has ever built.
The discovery#
Hwang survived the war. She moved to Brussels via Sweden, reunited with her fellow camp survivor and lover Nelly Mousset-Vos, and the two spent two decades in Caracas, Venezuela, passing publicly as cousins. Her health failing, she returned to Europe in the late 1960s.
In November 2015, a Chinese student named Aaron Zhang — attending a curatorial course at Yad Vashem through the University of Haifa’s Weiss-Livnat program — noticed the Chinese signature on the embroidered cloth. He spent years tracing the woman behind it, piecing together archives from Spain, Germany, France, and Venezuela. His research, published on The Times of Israel blog network, is the reason most English-speaking readers know her story at all. The 2022 documentary Nelly & Nadine by Magnus Gertten has since brought the love story to wider audiences.
Why this matters today#
Aaron Zhang’s central observation is worth holding on to: thousands of European Jews found refuge in Harbin, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, and their memory is preserved in Chinese cities. But on the other side of the globe, Jews and Chinese in Nazi Europe “were on the same boat.” The Hamburg Chinatown was destroyed. Chinese Europeans perished in the camps. One of them signed her name in thread — “黄China” — in the last days of Ravensbrück.
As sirens sounded across Israel this morning, Nadine Hwang deserves to be among the faces we remember.
Source: Times of Israel Blogs — Aaron Zhang, “‘China Hwang’ of the Nazi camp for women”
