Jenni Frazer

A love affair in front of death

For JN Life magazine

Every time I am presented with another book about the Holocaust, I think there can’t possibly be anything new to learn.

But in Keren Blankfeld’s mesmerising Lovers in Auschwitz, a masterful account of an extraordinary relationship in the worst death camp of all, there is plenty to learn and marvel at.

We are in the hands of a remarkable journalist, who brings all her considerable skills to bear in telling the story of Zippi Spitzer and David Wisnia, she a Czech graphic designer aged 25, and he, a 17-year-old Polish Jew with an enviable singing voice.

Even in civilian life, in so-called “normal” times, these two would have been an unlikely match. Blankfeld, to her enormous credit, does not put the two lovers front and centre to begin her story. Rather, she concentrates on setting the historical context of how Auschwitz came to be built, before telling us of David and Zippi’s separate journeys to the death camp, and how they survived.

Blankfeld, an award-winning journalist who teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism, is the granddaughter of four Holocaust refugees from eastern Europe who escaped the Nazis and made it to Brazil — where Blankfeld herself was born. She says: “I’ve always been fascinated by stories about new beginnings, about people who have lost everything and everyone — and manage to start again.”

In this spirit, researching for a book on refugees, she went to Pennsylvania to meet David Wisnia, then in his early 90s, because she had been told he had an amazing story — within six months he had survived Auschwitz, the subsequent Death March out of the camp, and had then become an American soldier after being “adopted” by a liberating American army unit.

“I met him, he told me his story, and I was about to leave, when he casually mentioned that he’d had a girlfriend in Auschwitz”.

Stopped in her tracks, Blankfeld sat back down and turned her tape recorder back on. Wisnia told her about Zippi, a “special, privileged” prisoner in Auschwitz. At first, Blankfeld admits, she thought he was “a little confused. But then [after she left Wisnia] I started reading about her, and the more I read, the more I thought that this was a story I needed to write”.

Indeed, Zippi Spitzer was special, and I have a distinct sense that Blankfeld is more than half in love with her, a woman who, even as the Nazis closed in on Czechoslovakia, was determined to qualify as a graphic designer, and who was also musically talented, both things which stood her in good stead when in prison in Auschwitz. She even became, temporarily, a member of the notorious Women’s Orchestra in the camp, playing the mandolin.

“I wish I had been able to meet her,” Blankfeld says now. “I have so many questions I would have liked to ask”. But Zippi, who became an admired Holocaust expert after the war, died in 2018, a few months short of her 100th birthday, and David died in 2021. Among the many fascinating facts in the book is that Zippi regularly kept track of her brother, Sam, who was imprisoned in Bratislava, through letters and postcards — who knew that Auschwitz inmates could receive post from outside the camp? (Both Sam and Zippi, incidentally, had been teenage members of Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist group, in Czechoslovakia.)

What strikes one when reading about Zippi Spitzer is her determination and singularity. By the time her eye landed on David Wisnia in Auschwitz, she had worked herself up to almost unheard of freedoms for a Jewish prisoner. She had, for example, her own private office and was relied upon by Nazi officers to provide impeccable records. Blankfeld indicates Spitzer’s exasperation with the widespread incompetence with which the camp was often run — a surprise for anyone used to believing in Nazi meticulousness.

David, for his part, had worked his way from lowest of the low to a trusted attendant, first at “Canada”, the sorting warehouse where incoming prisoners’ possessions were combed through, with valuables sent on to Berlin; and then to running the “Sauna”, a shower unit which really was a shower unit, rather than a preface to being gassed.

Both David and Zippi, at this stage in their time in Auschwitz, were in rather better health than many, better fed and with a highly developed sense of what was safe and what was incredibly dangerous, even to these privileged prisoners. So Zippi — who had been engaged to be married before she entered the camp in 1942, and whose fiancé met a horrible end — absolutely did not need to embark on a perilous love affair, which could so easily have been found out, resulting in instant death for both of them.

But she calculated the risk — and went ahead, anyway. Blankfeld believes she may have been lonely, and though at the beginning of their incarceration neither Zippi nor David could think of anything except food, by the time they began their affair, each was ready for an elevated kind of human touch.

“Whenever we talk about the Holocaust,” says Blankfeld, “we hear about numbers — six million who died. Part of the reason I wanted to write this book was that this story was about real human beings, and that it was a way to make new generations, who don’t have the connections that I had with my grandparents, learn about the reality of what was. And I wanted to write a completely non-fiction book that read like fiction. At the same time, I knew it was something where I couldn’t make mistakes. There are [Holocaust] deniers out there, and I knew I had to be very careful, to make sure that the facts were right.”

In that regard, Blankfeld has something in common with Zippi, who was “very protective” of what she did in Auschwitz, and spent much time after the war in keeping tabs on Holocaust historians “to make sure that all the details were correct”. David Wisnia, who became the chazan of the Har Sinai Temple in New Jersey, was “much more used to audiences and telling his story — and performing.”

If this were a Hollywood film the audience would be clamouring to know what happened next. Were they in love for real? Did they marry after the war?

In fact there is a film element — the much-lauded Cary Grant film, An Affair to Remember, said to be among the most romantic films of all time. Grant’s character and the heroine, played by Deborah Kerr, arrange to meet at the top of the Empire State Building. But she has a car accident on the way to meet him — and doesn’t turn up. In the days before mobile phones, she has no way of letting him know what has happened.

In real life, Zippi and David arranged to meet after liberation. She went to Warsaw to wait for him — but he, working with the American army, did not turn up. Some years later, David tried to meet her — but this time she did not turn up. Perhaps she was angry at his previous behaviour, but in any case, both of them were married to other people at that stage.

Finally, 72 years after they had last seen each other, Zippi and David did meet, at her home in New York. It was 2016 and he was accompanied by two of his grandsons, all of them extremely nervous. “Avi [David’s grandson, who played music with his cantor grandfather], said that when they first got there, Zippi didn’t recognise him, and that was his worst worry,” says Blankfeld.

“But then her eyes lit up. Avi said it was incredible, as soon as his grandfather leaned in and said his name, it was like she was transported back. They just connected.”

In her account in the book, Blankfeld tells the reader that Zippi gave David a hard time about why he hadn’t turned up in Warsaw. Then, after the couple had exchanged some reminiscences, David cannot help himself — had Zippi, the supreme “organiser”, had any hand in helping him to survive Auschwitz?

Yes, indeed, a hand. Avi Wisnia told Blankfeld that Zippi held up five fingers. “I saved you five times”, she said, “whenever they selected prisoners, I looked for you.” And the couple finally confessed that they had loved each other. Then David sang a Hungarian song that she had taught him in the camp.

So no, Lovers in Auschwitz is not a schmaltzy, cheesy, Hollywood-ised novel. But it is a genuinely beautiful love story.

Lovers in Auschwitz, by Keren Blankfeld, is published in paperback by Penguin Books at £10.99

  • 26 January, 2025
Tag line