Inspiring story needs no embellishment
Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story Keren Blankfeld Little, Brown
Lovers in Auschwitz is an incredible true story from a terrible time. The lovers of the title are Helen Zipora (Zippi) Spitzer, a young Jewish woman from Slovakia, and David Wisnia, a young Jewish man from Poland.
While imprisoned at Auschwitz-birkenau, Zippi secured a position helping the commandants of the women's camp, a role she tried to use to save other inmates; she also became romantically involved with David, a talented singer. After the war, Zippi and David were separated for decades, only to meet again at the end of Zippi's life, when new secrets were revealed.
Keren Blankfeld's book, which expands on a New York Times article, delves into life in wartime Bratislava and Warsaw and the inner workings of Auschwitz, but its focus lies squarely on its protagonists, Zippi and David. Their tale is compelling, though Blankfeld chooses to tell it in a way that some readers may find off-putting.
The rise of violent antisemitism, the Nazis and the Holocaust are a backdrop to the story of Zippi and David.
Zippi was a talented graphic designer with a penchant for reading people and thinking quickly; David was a skilled musician. Blankfeld does not break from telling Zippi and David's story to unpack some of the broader questions it raises.
She writes, for instance, of Zippi's friend Katya having an “affair” with Gerhard Palitzsch, a high-ranking SS officer. But can such language even be used to describe a relationship between a Nazi and a person who was, even if she'd obtained relative power, a prisoner? Blankfeld doesn't explore this.
In telling the story of this unusual couple, Blankfeld also takes an unusual formal approach: Though the book is written in the third person, the author also writes from the perspectives of Zippi, who died before Blankfeld learned of her story, and David, with whom she did speak.
In certain places, Blankfeld inserts, in italics, what she imagines the couple was thinking: “But words swelled from sputters to streams and currents of music. In whispers, they opened themselves up. Another risk. Their moment passed, and ended. Despite themselves, they made promises.”
This story doesn't need this kind of editorial flair. Zippi and David's story is already dramatic, the stuff of Hollywood, and the book covers not only their meeting and courtship in a concentration camp, but also their parting and what came after: how they were supposed to meet again, but didn't, and how they married other people and grew older, their paths potentially crossing but never doing so — until, finally, they did.
Even those who disagree with authorial choices will find much in their story inspiring. Zippi and David are both lovingly rendered. The book implicitly honours the full humanity of two survivors — recapturing the texture of their origins, their hopes and dreams, and their complex lives, rather than merely their presence at one of history's most unfathomable, tragic episodes.