In 2018, Keren Blankfeld was interviewing David Wisnia for a project on wartime refugees to the US. But when she had already got up and was about to leave, he mentioned that he had had a girlfriend in Auschwitz. So she sat right down again and began work on this recreation of their paradoxical romance.
Born in Warsaw in 1926, Wisnia had hoped to become a professional singer before his family was killed by the Nazis and he was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Even there, his singing skills were appreciated by his captors and he was given a relatively privileged position in what Blankfeld calls “the camp’s balmy disinfecting station” – known to prisoners as “the sauna”. It was here that he met Zippi Spitzer, eight years his senior, and they became lovers.
The first woman in Bratislava to qualify as a graphic designer, she was also deported to Auschwitz in 1942. She had one initial stroke of luck: her feet were so small that the SS had no reason to confiscate her boots. But she also demonstrated extraordinary powers of resilience. Even amid all the horrors of the women’s camp in Birkenau, we are told, she had the presence of mind to notice “the Nazis’ incompetence”. Since the prisoners’ back-breaking work was carried out in an atmosphere of “disorganisation and chaos”, she realised that “she could improve the women’s situation and save them from SS brutality by increasing [their] productivity”.
Spitzer’s background as a designer secured her a role painting thick red stripes on the backs of the inmates’ dresses (to distinguish them from civilians). But she and her friend Katya also found work in an administrative office, writes Blankfeld, where they helped the Nazis “bring order to Birkenau”. By making themselves almost indispensable, they both increased their own chances of survival and, according to witnesses, managed to save the lives of 1,600 others.
One of their schemes involved the creation of a women’s orchestra. When they discovered that a celebrated violin virtuoso called Alma Rosé was being held in the notorious sterilisation block, they arranged for her to be released and act as conductor. In one extraordinary episode, an accomplished cellist happened to arrive at Auschwitz. She was subjected to the camp’s standard initiation procedures – her hair was shaved, a number was painfully tattooed into her arm – yet as she stood naked in the shower room, Rosé turned up and asked if she wanted to audition for the orchestra.
It was probably around February 1944 that Spitzer and Wisnia began their occasional trysts in a “little hollow within a mountain of bundled clothing” in the warehouse that stored property confiscated from prisoners. Should they survive the war, they promised each other, they would meet up at the Jewish community centre in Warsaw.
This is a touching scene, but Blankfeld – perhaps on the advice of her publisher – can’t resist hyping it up and claiming that it offers “a spark of hope in a world of darkness”. While most of her writing is vigorous and straightforward, here she lapses into a series of overheated interludes full of lines such as: “Their eyes met and she saw a gleam of light inside a graveyard.” The book itself soon undermines such easy sentiment.
When she was eventually liberated, Spitzer did indeed go to Warsaw – but Wisnia failed to turn up. By then, he had been given a uniform and adopted as a kind of mascot and unofficial interpreter by a unit of the victorious American army, so all his energies were focused on emigrating to the US. Yet he remained haunted by his lost love. Spitzer refused to meet him when he first reached out to her in 1949 or 1950 but changed her mind when he tried again in 1963. Blankfeld gives us a highly speculative account of him driving to their rendezvous in Manhattan (“He sat alone in his Jaguar; perhaps the convertible top was down, the wind blowing against his hairline… Did he grip the steering wheel, white-knuckled?”), but this time she failed to turn up. They only finally managed to meet again in 2016, when she was bedridden and almost 98, moved by memories of their liaison but still furious he had not come to Warsaw as agreed.
Spitzer never mentioned Wisnia in her writings or formal interviews with historians, and he was already 92 when Blankfeld began interviewing him in depth. So she has attempted to reconstruct a brief love affair, where one party felt betrayed and the other felt guilty, almost entirely from the one-sided reminiscences of a nonagenarian. This, as she acknowledges, raises some obvious problems. The book captures well how some astute and very lucky Jews were able to exercise limited forms of agency even within Auschwitz. And there is something inspiring about Wisnia and particularly Spitzer’s sheer will to survive and build new lives for themselves. But it is a real pity that the writing starts to ring false whenever their romance takes centre stage.
• Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story by Keren Blankfeld is published by WH Allen (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
