Love in the murder factory

An extraordinary romance was somehow able to blossom amid Auschwitz’s horrific conveyor belt of death’.

- JENNY NICHOLLS

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.