(Writer Unknown)
The first time he spoke to her, in 1943, by the Auschwitz
crematory, David Wisnia realized that Helen Spitzer was no regular inmate.
Zippi, as she was known, was clean, always neat. She wore a jacket and smelled
good. They were introduced by a fellow inmate, at her request.
On their set date, Mr. Wisnia went as planned to meet at the
barracks between crematories 4 and 5. He climbed on top of a makeshift ladder
made up of packages of prisoners’ clothing. Ms. Spitzer had arranged it, a
space amid hundreds of piles, just large enough to fit the two of them. Mr.
Wisnia was 17 years old; she was 25.
“I had no knowledge of what, when, where,” Mr. Wisnia recently
reminisced at age 93. “She taught me everything.”
They were both Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, both privileged
prisoners. Mr. Wisnia, initially forced to collect the bodies of prisoners who
committed suicide, had been chosen to entertain his Nazi captors when they
discovered he was a talented singer.
Ms. Spitzer held the more high-powered position: She was the
camp’s graphic designer. They became lovers, meeting in their nook at a
prescribed time about once a month. After the initial fears of knowing they
were putting their lives in danger, they began to look forward to their dates.
Mr. Wisnia felt special. “She chose me,” he recalled.
Ms. Spitzer held the more high-powered position: She was the
camp’s graphic designer. They became lovers, meeting in their nook at a
prescribed time about once a month. After the initial fears of knowing they
were putting their lives in danger, they began to look forward to their dates.
Mr. Wisnia felt special. “She chose me,” he recalled.
They didn’t talk much. When they did, they told each other brief
snippets of their past. Mr. Wisnia had an opera-loving father who’d inspired
his singing, and who’d perished with the rest of his family at the Warsaw
ghetto. Ms. Spitzer, who also loved music — she played the piano and the
mandolin — taught Mr. Wisnia a Hungarian song. Below the boxes of clothing,
fellow prisoners stood guard, prepared to warn them if an SS officer was
approaching.
For a few months, they managed to be each other’s escape, but
they knew these visits wouldn’t last. Around them, death was everywhere. Still,
the lovers planned a life together, a future outside of Auschwitz. They knew
they would be separated, but they had a plan, after the fighting was done, to
reunite.
It took them 72 years.
On a recent afternoon this fall, Mr. Wisnia sat in his house of
67 years in his adopted hometown in Levittown, Pa., looking through old
photographs. Still a passionate singer, Mr. Wisnia spent decades as a cantor at
the local congregation. Now, about once a month, he gives speeches where he
tells war stories, usually to students and sometimes at libraries or
congregations.
“There are few people left who know the details,” he said.
In January, Mr. Wisnia plans to fly with his family to
Auschwitz, where he has been invited to sing at the 75th anniversary of the
camp’s liberation. He expects to recognize only one fellow survivor there. The
last big anniversary, five years ago, which he attended, included about 300
Holocaust survivors. The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany
estimates that only 2,000 survivors of Auschwitz are alive today.
As the Holocaust fades from public memory and
anti-Semitism is once again on the rise, Mr. Wisnia finds himself speaking
about his past with more urgency. This is quite a turn for a man who spent most
of his adult life trying not to look back. Mr. Wisnia’s oldest son learned only
as a teenager that his father wasn’t born in America. (His father worked hard
to lose his European accent.)
Mr. Wisnia’s children and grandchildren coaxed him to talk about
his past. Gradually, he opened up. Once he started sharing his story, others
convinced him to speak publicly. In 2015, he published a memoir, “One Voice,
Two Lives: From Auschwitz Prisoner to 101st Airborne Trooper.” That
was when his family first learned about his Auschwitz girlfriend. He referred
to Ms. Spitzer under a pseudonym, Rose. Their reunion, as it turns out, hadn’t
gone quite as planned. By the time he and Ms. Spitzer met again, they both had
already married other people.
“How do you share such a story with your family?” Mr. Wisnia
wondered.
Ms. Spitzer was among the first Jewish women to arrive in
Auschwitz in March of 1942. She came from Slovakia, where she attended a
technical college and said she was the first woman in the region to finish an
apprenticeship as a graphic artist. In Auschwitz, she arrived with 2,000
unmarried women.
At first, she was assigned grueling demolition work at the
sub-camp, Birkenau. She was malnourished and perpetually ill with typhus,
malaria and diarrhea. She persisted as a laborer until a chimney collapsed on
her, injuring her back. Through her connections, her ability to speak German,
her graphic design skills and sheer luck, Ms. Spitzer secured an office job.
Her initial assignments included mixing red powder paint with
varnish to draw a vertical stripe on female prisoners’ uniforms. Eventually,
she started registering all female arrivals in camp, she said in 1946 testimony documented by the psychologist
David Boder, who recorded the first interviews with survivors after the war.
By the time Ms. Spitzer met Mr. Wisnia, she was working from a
shared office. Together with another Jewish woman, she was responsible for
organizing Nazi paperwork. She made monthly charts of the camp’s labor force.
As Ms. Spitzer’s responsibilities grew, she was free to move
around within parts of the camp and sometimes was allowed excursions outside.
She showered regularly and didn’t have to wear an armband. She used her
extensive knowledge of the grounds to build a 3-D model of the camp. Ms. Spitzer’s
privileges were such that she managed to correspond with her only surviving
brother in Slovakia through coded postcards.
Yet Ms. Spitzer was never a Nazi collaborator or a kapo, a Jew
assigned to oversee other prisoners. Instead, she used her position to help
inmates and allies. She used her design skills to manipulate paperwork and
reassign prisoners to different job assignments and barracks. She had access to
official camp reports, which she shared with various resistance groups,
according to Konrad Kwiet, a professor at the University of Sydney.
Dr. Kwiet interviewed Ms. Spitzer for an essay published in the
book “Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor.” In the
book, edited by Jürgen Matthäus, director of applied research at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ms. Spitzer was interviewed by five different
historians, each chronicling her life from a different perspective.
“It’s certainly not surprising to me that people in Zippi’s
position would have lovers and they would try to use their influence to save
people,” said Atina Grossmann, a professor at the Cooper Union in New York, who
interviewed Ms. Spitzer for the book.
“For everybody you saved, you were condemning someone else,” Dr.
Grossmann said. “You had to be very precise, and that’s how you kept the
Germans at bay.”
Mr. Wisnia was assigned to the “corpse unit” when he arrived.
His job was to collect bodies of prisoners who’d flung themselves against the
electric fence surrounding the camp. He dragged those corpses to a barrack,
where they were hauled off by trucks.
Within months word got around that Mr. Wisnia was a gifted
singer. He started singing regularly to Nazi guards and was assigned a new job
at a building the SS called the Sauna. He disinfected the clothing of new
arrivals with the same Zyklon B pellets used to murder prisoners in the gas
chamber.
Ms. Spitzer, who’d noticed Mr. Wisnia at the Sauna, began making
special visits. Once they’d established contact, she paid off inmates with food
to keep watch for 30 minutes to an hour each time they met.
Their relationship lasted several months. One afternoon in 1944
they realized it would probably be their final climb up to their nook. The
Nazis were transporting the last of the camp prisoners on death marches and
destroying evidence of their crimes.
As crematories were demolished, there were whispers within the
camp that the Soviets were advancing. The war might end soon. Mr. Wisnia and
Ms. Spitzer had survived Auschwitz for more than two years while most prisoners
never made it past a few months. In Auschwitz alone, 1.1 million people were
murdered.
During their last rendezvous they made a plan. They would meet
in Warsaw when the war was over, at a community center. It was a promise.
Mr. Wisnia left before Ms. Spitzer on one of the last transports
out of Auschwitz. He was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp in
December 1944. Soon after, during a death march from Dachau, he happened upon a
hand shovel. He struck an SS guard and ran. The next day, while hiding in a
barn, he heard what he thought were Soviet troops approaching. He ran to the
tanks and hoped for the best. It turned out to be Americans.
He couldn’t believe his good fortune. Since he was 10 years old,
Mr. Wisnia had dreamed of singing opera in New York. Before the war, he’d
written a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt requesting a visa so he
could study music in America. His mother’s two sisters had emigrated to the
Bronx in the 1930s, and he’d memorized their address. Throughout his ordeal in
Auschwitz, that address had become a sort of prayer for him, a guidepost.
Now, faced with soldiers from the 101st Airborne, he was beyond
relieved. The troops adopted him after hearing his tale, told in fragments of
the little English he spoke, some German, Yiddish and Polish. They fed him
Spam, he said, gave him a uniform, handed him a machine gun and taught him to
use it. Europe would be his past, he decided. “I didn’t want anything to do
with anything European,” he said. “I became 110 percent American.”
In his capacity with the American Army, Mr. Wisnia became
“Little Davey,” an interpreter and civilian aide. Now he got to interrogate the
Germans and confiscate their weapons. Now he took prisoners of war.
“Our boys were not so nice to the SS,” Mr. Wisnia said.
His unit trekked south to Austria, liberating towns along the
way. The troops protected Mr. Wisnia, and he in turn transformed himself into
an American. By the end of the war, they made it to Hitler’s mountain retreat
in Berchtesgaden. Here, they helped themselves to Hitler’s wine and myriad
treasures. Mr. Wisnia took a Walther gun, a Baldur camera and a semiautomatic
pistol.
Even though, as a Pole, he never could become a full-fledged
G.I., Mr. Wisnia performed numerous jobs after the war with the American Army.
He worked at the Army Post Exchange, which provided basic supplies to soldiers.
He also sometimes drove to the displaced persons camp in the city of Feldafing
to deliver supplies. Once he’d joined the Americans, his plan to meet Zippi in
Warsaw was no longer even a consideration. America was his future.
Ms. Spitzer was among the last to leave the camp alive. She was
sent to the women’s camp at Ravensbrück and a sub-camp in Malchow before being
evacuated in a death march. She and a friend escaped the march by removing the
red stripe she had painted on their uniforms, allowing them to blend with the
local population that was fleeing.
As the Red Army advanced and the Nazis surrendered, Ms. Spitzer
made her way to her childhood home in Bratislava, Slovakia. Her parents and
siblings were gone, save for one brother, who’d just gotten married. She
decided to leave him unburdened to start his new life.
According to Dr. Grossmann, the historian, Ms. Spitzer’s account
of her journey immediately after the war was deliberately vague. She alluded to
smuggling Jews across borders through the Bricha, an underground movement that
helped refugees move illegally across Eastern Europe and into Palestine.
Millions of survivors were displaced, and Europe was teeming
with displaced persons camps. Some 500 such camps materialized in Germany. Amid
the chaos, Ms. Spitzer made it to the first all-Jewish displaced persons camp
in the American zone of occupied Germany, which in the spring of 1945 housed at
least 4,000 survivors. It was called Feldafing, the same camp that Mr. Wisnia
would deliver supplies to.
The odds they would be in the same place were remarkable. “I
would drive over there to Feldafing, but I had no idea she was there,” Mr.
Wisnia said.
Soon after she arrived in Feldafing in September of 1945, Ms.
Spitzer married Erwin Tichauer, the camp’s acting police chief and a United
Nations security officer, roles that allowed him to work closely with the
American military. Once again, Ms. Spitzer, now known as Ms. Tichauer, was in a
privileged position. Although they, too, were displaced persons, the Tichauers
lived outside the camp.
Ms. Tichauer, then 27, was among the oldest of the survivors in
Feldafing. Because of her husband’s position, she told Dr. Grossmann, she was
considered “top management” at the camp. As such, she distributed food among
the refugees, particularly the booming population of pregnant women. In the
fall of 1945, she accompanied her husband when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and
Gen. George S. Patton came for a tour of the camp.
Ms. Tichauer and her husband devoted years of their lives to
humanitarian causes. They went on missions through the United Nations to Peru
and Bolivia and Indonesia. In between, Dr. Tichauer taught bioengineering at
the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
Throughout their travels, Ms. Tichauer continued to learn new
languages and use her design skills to help populations in need, particularly
pregnant women and new mothers. Her existence was not defined by her experience
as a Holocaust survivor, said Dr. Matthäus. “She had a much richer life,” he
said. “There was a lot that she achieved with her husband.”
Eventually, the Tichauers moved to America, first to Austin,
Tex., and then in 1967 they settled in New York, where Dr. Tichauer became a
bioengineering professor at New York University. In their apartment, surrounded
by books about the Holocaust, Ms. Tichauer spoke regularly with historians. She
never gave speeches and said she despised the concept of the Holocaust as a
business. The historians she entrusted with her story became part of her
family. Dr. Kwiet, who called her from Australia every Friday, saw Ms. Tichauer
as a mother figure.
“Her duty was not to be a professional survivor,” said Dr.
Grossmann. “Her job was to be the historian’s historian. She was committed to
this very sober, almost technical rendition of what happened.”
Yet throughout the many hours she devoted to detailing the
horrors of Auschwitz to a number of historians, Ms. Tichauer never once
mentioned Mr. Wisnia.
Sometime after the war ended, Mr. Wisnia heard from a former
Auschwitz inmate that Ms. Tichauer was alive. By then he was deeply enmeshed
with the American Army, based in Versailles, France, where he waited until he
could finally emigrate to the United States.
When his aunt and uncle picked him up at the port in Hoboken in
February 1946, they couldn’t believe the 19-year-old in a G.I. uniform was the
little David they last saw in Warsaw.
In a rush to make up for lost time, Mr. Wisnia plunged into New
York City life, going to dances and parties. He rode the subway from his aunt’s
house in the Bronx to anywhere around Manhattan. He answered an ad in a local
paper and got a job selling encyclopedias.
In 1947, at a wedding, he met his future wife, Hope. Five years
later, the couple moved to Philadelphia. He became a vice president of sales
for Wonderland of Knowledge Corporation, the encyclopedia company, until his
career as a cantor took off.
Years after he’d settled down with his wife in Levittown, a
friend of the lovers told Mr. Wisnia that Zippi was in New York City. Mr.
Wisnia, who had told his wife about his former girlfriend, thought this would
be an opportunity to reconnect, and he could finally ask how he had managed to
survive Auschwitz.
Their friend arranged a meeting. Mr. Wisnia drove the two hours
from Levittown to Manhattan and waited at a hotel lobby across from Central
Park.
“She never showed up,” said Mr. Wisnia. “I found out after that
she decided it wouldn’t be smart. She was married; she had a husband.”
Over the years, Mr. Wisnia kept tabs on Ms. Tichauer through
their mutual friend. Meanwhile, his family grew — he had four children and six
grandchildren. In 2016 Mr. Wisnia decided to try again to reach out to Zippi.
He’d shared the story with his family. His son, who was now a rabbi at a Reform
synagogue in Princeton, N.J., initiated contact for him. Finally, she agreed to
a visit.
In August 2016, Mr. Wisnia took two of his grandchildren with
him to the reunion with Ms. Tichauer. He was silent during most of the car ride
from Levittown to Manhattan. He didn’t know what to expect. It had been 72
years since he’d last seen his former girlfriend. He’d heard she was in poor
health but knew very little about her life. He suspected she’d helped to keep
him alive and wanted to know if this was true.
When Mr. Wisnia and his grandchildren arrived at her apartment
in the East 30s, they found Ms. Tichauer lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by
shelves filled with books. She had been alone since her husband died in 1996,
and they’d never had any children. Over the years, bed-bound, she’d gone
increasingly blind and deaf. She had an aide looking after her, and the
telephone had become her lifeline to the world.
At first, she didn’t recognize him. Then Mr. Wisnia leaned in
close.
“Her eyes went wide, almost like life came back to her,” said
Mr. Wisnia’s grandson Avi Wisnia, 37. “It took us all aback.”
Suddenly there was a flow of words between Mr. Wisnia and Ms.
Tichauer, all in their adopted English tongue.
“She said to me in front of my grandchildren, she said, ‘Did you
tell your wife what we did?’” Mr. Wisnia remembered, chuckling, shaking his
head.” I said, ‘Zippi!’”
Mr. Wisnia talked about his children, his time in the American
Army. Ms. Tichauer spoke about her humanitarian work after the war and her
husband. She marveled at Mr. Wisnia’s perfect English. “My God,” she said. “I
never thought that we would see each other again — and in New York.”
The reunion lasted about two hours. He finally had to ask: Did
she have something to do with the fact that he’d managed to survive in
Auschwitz all that time?
She held up her hand to display five fingers. Her voice was
loud, her Slovakian accent deep. “I saved you five times from bad shipment,”
she said.
“I knew she would do that,” said Mr. Wisnia to his
grandchildren. “It’s absolutely amazing. Amazing.”
There was more. “I was waiting for you,” Ms. Tichauer said. Mr.
Wisnia was astonished. After she escaped the death march, she had waited for
him in Warsaw. She’d followed the plan. But he never came.
She had loved him, she told him quietly. He had loved her, too,
he said.
Mr. Wisnia and Ms. Tichauer never saw each other again. She died
last year at age 100. On their last afternoon together, before Mr. Wisnia left
her apartment, she asked him to sing to her. He took her hand and sang her the
Hungarian song she taught him in Auschwitz. He wanted to show her that he
remembered the words.
