He was 17; she was 25. They fell for each other and met secretly for nearly a year before going their separate ways. It might, in another decade, have been a sweet but otherwise unremarkable interlude in two young lives, except for the setting. And the stakes. Already, their survival made them remarkable.
Their trysts took place in a hidden nest made from clothing of the dead, wreathed in smoke and human ash from the buildings known to history as Crematoria IV and V at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. Unlike the camp’s other killing machines, these two buildings had not been repurposed, but designed from the beginning with a single purpose in mind. Having the undressing room, gas chamber and furnace all on the same level created, in the words of historian Laurence Rees, “a kind of conveyor belt of death”.
Between 1942 and 1944, freight carriages stopped at Auschwitz, disgorging men, women and children from all over Europe, including Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Bohemia, Moravia, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Italy and Norway. Their chances of survival were slim – out of 1.3 million arrivals, 1.1 million were murdered, many within hours. Those admitted into the camp who were not subsequently gassed died of disease, malnutrition and overwork. It is estimated that one in six of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust died at Auschwitz.
But some did survive. Among the lucky few were a Slovakian graphic designer, Helen Spitzer (Zippi), and a Polish teenager, David Wisnia: Birkenau prisoners 2286 and 83526.
US journalist Keren Blankfeld came across their romantic relationship, never before documented, in 1998 after interviewing Wisnia for a project on refugees. She missed meeting Spitzer, who died, aged 99, the same year. She had left behind memoirs and much recorded testimony, giving Blankfeld enough material to write this absorbing book about two remarkable characters, and their love affair in the darkest of places.
Wisnia emerges as charming and charismatic, but Spitzer, in these pages, is formidable: wise, ingenious, self-sacrificing, sharp as a tack. The first woman in her hometown in Slovakia to qualify as a graphic designer, she was transported to Auschwitz in March 1942, aged 23. Wisnia arrived at the end of the year, just 16 when he scrambled out of a freight car into an unimaginable hell.
Of all the killing fields of Auschwitz, Birkenau was the worst. While it contained elements of Nazi concentration and labour camps, Birkenau’s speciality was extermination. The capacity and efficiency of its gas chambers gave it the edge in Nazi efforts to kill every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe.
Birkenau, wrote Rees, was “the biggest murder factory ever built … the practical manifestation of the Nazis’ ideological imperative”. Its distinctive gatehouse silhouette became one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust.
How did Wisnia and Spitzer survive for so long? Chance played its part. Inmates lost their clothes and hair after being admitted to the camp, and were granted wooden clogs, often mismatched. Thanks to her tiny feet, Spitzer managed to keep her own boots, possibly because they were too small to appeal to the guards. These made a difference during her first gruelling shifts outdoors.
Wisnia’s trained singing voice came to his rescue. To ensure he lived to entertain them, camp officials sent him to work in a clothing disinfecting station so warm in winter it was nicknamed “the sauna”.
Spitzer also won a privileged role, becoming Birkenau’s graphic designer. Under SS direction, she painted lettering for parcels and signs and wide, red identifying stripes on prisoners’ clothing. She was also chief clerical assistant to the chief operating officer at Auschwitz, Katya Singer, an inmate favoured by the Nazis for her organisational skills and Germanic looks. Singer turned out to be, quite literally, a lifesaver. Although she became the lover of a notorious Nazi, she risked her life juggling prison numbers, along with Spitzer. Together, they saved 1600 lives, according to survivor testimony. Wisnia didn’t realise it at the time, but he owed his life to Spitzer’s access to gas chamber lists. She later told him she had saved him five times, by swapping his prisoner number with that of a dead inmate.
The couple weren’t at Birkenau to watch Soviet troops arrive on January 27, 1945, a day now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Like every other prisoner who wasn’t too sick to move, Spitzer and Wisnia were sent on harrowing journeys in different directions, deep into Germany. Again, by some miracle, they survived.
Their later adventures in life make for a poignant read – but it would be churlish to spoil the ending.
Although Spitzer never mentioned her death camp love affair in interviews or her memoirs, her accounts of Birkenau are the backbone of Blankfeld’s book. She doesn’t use Spitzer’s records to put words in her mouth, a scrupulous approach; more dubious are the occasional romantic fictionalised interludes, her change in tone signalled by a change of font.
What would the no-nonsense Spitzer have thought?
While these are short and evocative, the most striking details in the book are provided by the 92-year-old Wisnia, who seemingly recalled long ago moments with photographic clarity.
“As an SS officer loomed over him,” records Blankfeld, “[his] gaze fell to the words inscribed across his brass belt buckle: ‘God is with us.’”
Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story by Keren Blankfeld (WH Allen, $40) is out now.
