February 14, 2020
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These couples opened their hearts to one another while surrounded daily by terror, violence and death. They say the were lucky to survive, when millions perished.
Here are the stories of three couple, whose luck was backed by courage, hope and love.
How Three Couples' Love Cheated Death
Helen "Zippy" Spitzer was "invited" by Czechoslovakian Nazis to work in the fields in North Slovakia. She was one of 2000 single women told that if they went along with the two-month assignment, their parents would be spared.
But after a long railroad trip in cattle cars, the women were chased roughly off the train somewhere in Poland. Zippy saw "in the German language in printed block letters the sign Concentration Camp Auschwitz, which, so to speak, aroused in us some obscure uneasiness."
Zippy Spitzer had trained as a graphic artist and was the only volunteer when Nazis needed a "painter."
Early on at Auschwitz, the women were issued old Russian military uniforms, or civilian clothing stolen from people arriving at the camp. Zippy went to work painting a stripe down the back of each woman's clothing, so they could be differentiated from civilians.
Later, her duties expanded to include keeping record books of the camp population, which gave her detailed information about what was happening in the camp. She passed information to resistance groups and was able to help save some prisoner's lives.
Due to her work, Zippy had more freedom of movement in the camp than most. She noticed a young man, David Wisnia, a singer chosen to entertain the Nazis, and arranged to be introduced to him.
They began meeting secretly, stealing away to a hollow among stacks of confiscated clothing. For a few months, the lovers gave each other reason to hope for a future and a stronger will to survive. They knew their lives were precarious, but made plans for a future together. They promised each other that if they survived they would rendezvous in Warsaw after the war.
In January 1945, Nazis at Auschwitz got orders to destroy all evidence of atrocities, the Russian army was closing in. They demolished the crematoriums and began marching or hauling tens of thousands of prisoners to other camps in Germany and Austria.
Zippy and David both managed to escape the Nazis on their separate death marches. Incredibly, they had both survived two years in the death camp, where few prisoners survived beyond a couple months.
After the war, they did not reunite as planned. Both married others, lived full lives and ended up living in United States. Eventually they both heard through the survivor grape vine that the other had made it out alive.
In 1916, they agreed to meet in New York, 72-years since they had parted.
At age 98, Zippy was bedridden and nearly blind, but she recognized David. They visited for two hours, catching up on the last seven decades.
Each confessed they had truly loved each other in the nightmare at Auschwitz, Zippy acknowledging that she had finessed the paperwork to save David from the gas chamber five times.
In this next love story, it is the guy who saves the girl and their love that saves them both.
Paula and Klaus grew up Jewish in Nazi Germany, and both went to the same Hachschara, a farm where Jewish youth gained agricultural training in hopes of qualifying for visas to leave the country.
The two met and fell in love and married. But fearing they would not be able to escape Germany, they formulated a plan in case the were separated. They would meet in Paula's hometown, Arnstadt, Germany after the war.
Eight months after their wedding, Nazis rounded up Jews on the farm and put them on a train to Auschwitz. Things moved quickly once they arrived at the camp, Paula remembered later. "You had to go in lines. Men, women. Young women, young men. All of a sudden, he was gone."
Gone, but still close enough to yell a warning that saved Paula's life. She tells what happened in the one minute video below.
Paula survived more than two years at Auschwitz where she worked in a nearby munitions plant. She knew nothing of what happened to Klaus, but their love gave her the strength not to give up.
When Nazis cleared out Auschwitz in 1945, Paula survived a forced march in freezing weather until the prisoners were liberated by Russian Troops. She made her way home Arnstadt, hoping to see Klaus.
He wasn't there to meet her, but one day she received a note that had been passed through various hands across nearly 250 miles of war-torn Germany. It said, "Paula, stay where you are. I'm alive. I'm coming as soon as I can. I'm in Bavaria."
Klaus had survived time in five different camps, until May 1945, when American troops liberated Muehldorf. Though starving, weak and sick with typhoid he recovered enough to make a month-long journey and rejoin Paula.
In 1946, the couple came to the United States and settled in Seattle. Klaus and Paula were married for 68-years before he died.
The love story of Herschel and Edith, (nicknamed Edjya) begins when they both separately escape en-route to the Treblinka death camp.
When the Jews of Bransk, Poland were rounded up and sent to a ghetto in 1939, none of them knew how the danger would escalate.
But by the time teenager Herschel Lipa had put in several years at a nearby forced labor camp, he had suspicions when the Jews were told they would be moved to a new location.
"I had heard terrible stories," Herschel said. "I knew things."
As the German soldiers loaded the prisoners into horse-drawn wagons, Hershel took a chance. First he ripped off his yellow star, a crime for which he could be summarily shot. Then he grabbed a whip, pretending to be a wagon driverm until he could slip away unnoticed.
The wagon loads of workers ended up aboard a train for Treblinka, and the following day the Jews of the Bransk ghetto followed them. Herschel lost every member of his family.
About a year later, Jews in Bialystok, Poland, suffered the same fate. Seventeen-year-old Edjya and her mother were forced on a train for Treblinka. Edjya's mother noticed a tiny air vent near the top of the car.
“You’re a skinny one, Edjya...Quickly, up there," she pointed. "Edjya, go through....When you hit the ground, run, Edjya, run. And tell someone. Tell someone what is happening!”
The young girl slid through feet first, holding tight to a towel which the women in the car used to help lower her.
Guards shot at Edjya as she dropped to the ground and ran, but she made it safely into the forest and survived the summer and fall. Then one a snowy winter night, Polish militia fighters loyal to the Nazis barged into the barn where Edjya and other Jews had stowed away.
Within moments, machine gun fire downed the entire group and the militia hastily piled the bodies in a shallow grave.
Hershel had taken up with Jewish partisan fighters in the area, and when they got news of the massacre, he and another boy were sent to properly bury the bodies. "I will never forget that night," Herschel said. "It was very cold and there was a full moon."
Going about his duty uncovering the bodies, Herschel noticed a leg moving. He found a girl still alive. One of her legs was wounded and badly infected with gangrene.
The girl was Edjya. "When I saw his blond hair and blue eyes, I was afraid I was being kidnapped by a German soldier," she said. "Herschel assured me in Yiddish that he was indeed Jewish and that he would take care of me."
Herschel carried her to the farm of a Polish women he knew to have some medical training, and bartered for help. In exchange for stolen pig, the woman cut away the rotten tissue of Edjya's leg. But it was too dangerous to stay at the farm.
The young couple returned to the forest, and Herschel cared for Edjya, cleaning her wounds with alcohol and keeping her leg bandaged with rags. They survived together in the woods for two years, sleeping in caves, scavenging roots and berries and sometimes stealing food.
When the Russian Army liberated Poland, Herschel and Edjya emerged from hiding and went searching for a rabbi to marry them.
A year later, the couple later emigrated to America, where they changed their last name to Black.
Edjya reverted to her given name, Ethel, and Herschel was known by friends and family as Harry. They made their home in Chicago, where they had two sons and a daughter.
The photo, courtesy of their granddaughter Rachel Black, shows Ethel and Harry enjoying a New Year's Eve dance.
One of their sons, Edward Black said, "Like many people in my generation, my parents only spoke about [surviving the Holocaust] in whispers."
But their love, and that of the other couples, spoke loud and clear. If, in the presence of evil, love has the will to survive, think what great things it can accomplish in the daily humdrum of our lives.
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