“You have a mixed story here — you won’t be able to put them together,” Mr. Blum said, even while acknowledging that, yes, it was young, bold love
that prodded him to stand up to a Nazi guard and save his sweetheart from being sent to the Treblinka death camp.
For Isaac and Rosa Blum, who became teenage sweethearts 75 years ago in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland,
that moment came as they and thousands of other terrified Jews were being herded to a death camp by Nazi soldiers.
With their families sent to their deaths, they were placed in a smaller ghetto of about 5,000 Jews and, the lie about being siblings never detected, they were issued a marriage
license so they could live briefly in a residence for couples before being separated in different barracks at the factory site, which was patrolled by armed guards.
“I went up to the German and told him, ‘That’s my sister,’ even though she was my girlfriend.”
Miraculously, they were both pulled off the line and managed to survive the Holocaust by working as slave laborers in a munitions factory.
In that chaotic, horrific moment, he spied Rosa, brazenly approached a Nazi officer
and tried to save the teenage girl up ahead walking with her family.
Mr. Blum was pulled from the line to work in the factory, while his family was pushed onward toward the trains bound for Treblinka.
Asked to recount their lengthy love affair, they noted the absurdity of couching it — a romance
incubated in the hell of the Holocaust — in the frilly trappings of Valentine’s Day.
