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
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.
They were both Jewish inmates in Auschwitz, both privileged prisoners. 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. As the Holocaust fades from public memory and anti-Semitism is once again on the rise, 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. Wisnia’s oldest son only learned as a teenager that his father wasn’t born in America.
By the time Spitzer met 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. “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 Spitzer for the book.
Spitzer, who had noticed Wisnia at the Sauna, began making special visits. Once they had established contact, she paid off inmates with food to keep watch for 30 minutes to an hour each time they met. Wisnia left before 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.
Even though, as a Pole, he never could become a full-fledged GI, 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.
Millions of survivors were displaced, and Europe was teeming with displaced persons camps. Some 500 such camps materialized in Germany. Amid the chaos, 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 Wisnia would deliver supplies to.
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, Tichauer taught bioengineering at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. Yet throughout the many hours she devoted to detailing the horrors of Auschwitz to a number of historians, Tichauer never once mentioned Wisnia.
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 Corp., the encyclopedia company, until his career as a cantor took off.
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