In 2018, Keren Blankfeld was interviewing David Wisnia for a project on wartime refugees to the US. But when she had already got up and was about to leave, he mentioned that he had had a girlfriend in Auschwitz. So she sat right down again and began work on this recreation of their paradoxical romance.
Born in Warsaw in 1926, Wisnia had hoped to become a professional singer before his family was killed by the Nazis and he was deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Even there, his singing skills were appreciated by his captors and he was given a relatively privileged position in what Blankfeld calls “the camp’s balmy disinfecting station” – known to prisoners as “the sauna”. It was here that he met Zippi Spitzer, eight years his senior, and they became lovers.
