“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<br />that prodded him to stand up to a Nazi guard and save his sweetheart from being sent to the Treblinka death camp.<br />For Isaac and Rosa Blum, who became teenage sweethearts 75 years ago in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland,<br />that moment came as they and thousands of other terrified Jews were being herded to a death camp by Nazi soldiers.<br />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<br />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.<br />“I went up to the German and told him, ‘That’s my sister,’ even though she was my girlfriend.”<br />Miraculously, they were both pulled off the line and managed to survive the Holocaust by working as slave laborers in a munitions factory.<br />In that chaotic, horrific moment, he spied Rosa, brazenly approached a Nazi officer<br />and tried to save the teenage girl up ahead walking with her family.<br />Mr. Blum was pulled from the line to work in the factory, while his family was pushed onward toward the trains bound for Treblinka.<br />Asked to recount their lengthy love affair, they noted the absurdity of couching it — a romance<br />incubated in the hell of the Holocaust — in the frilly trappings of Valentine’s Day.
