At the first opportunity that came along, a miraculous opportunity, she left for Russia. There was still no communication with that country ravaged by civil war. It was 1921. A Red Cross mission was preparing to travel to the Volga region, where famine had claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. Charlotte was taken on as a nurse. Her application had been quickly accepted: volunteers for the expedition were rare. But above all, she spoke Russian.

Once over there she believed that she had come to know hell. In the distance it looked like peaceful Russian villages – izbas, wells, hedges – swathed in the mists of the great river. Close to, it froze into shots taken by the mission photographer in those somber days: a group of male and female peasants in lambskin greatcoats, transfixed before a heap of human carcasses, dismembered bodies, unrecognizable fragments of flesh. Then this naked child in the snow with long, tangled hair, an old man's piercing stare, and the body of an insect. Finally, on an icy road – that head, alone, with open eyes, glassy Worst of all, these pictures did not remain fixed. The photographer folded up his tripod, and the peasants left, stopping outside the frame of the photo – that terrifying photo of the cannibals – and resumed the daily round of their lives with all its disconcerting simplicity. Yes, they continued living! A woman bent over the child and recognized him as her son. And she did not know what to do with this old-man-insect, she who for weeks had fed on human flesh. Then what could be heard arising from her throat was the howl of a wolf. No photo could capture that cry… A peasant looked into the eyes of the head thrown down onto the road and sighed. Then he leaned over and with a clumsy hand thrust it into a great homespun sack. "I'll bury it," he muttered. "After all, we're not Tartars…"

And you had to go into the izbasof this tranquil hell to discover that the old woman watching the street through the window was the mummified corpse of a girl who had died several weeks previously, seated at that window in the vain hope of rescue.