Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question.
'Was she the reason he was alive today?
David Wisnia at his home in Pennsylvania.
Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later. He Had One Question.
Was she the reason he was alive today?
By Keren Blankfeld
Dec. 8, 2019, 3:00 a.m. ET
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.
Her presence was unusual in itself: a woman outside the women’s quarters, speaking with a male prisoner. Before Mr. Wisnia knew it, they were alone, all the prisoners around them gone. This wasn’t a coincidence, he later realized. They made a plan to meet again in a week.
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.”'>>>
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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.
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.
