The two newlyweds have dressed up for the photo, but they’re not smiling. And with good reason: their union was sealed in Auschwitz – the only marriage known to have taken place in the death camp.
The faded photograph of Rudolf Friemel, an Austrian communist who opposed the Nazis, and his Spanish wife Margarita Ferrer Rey can now be seen in his hometown of Vienna.
It is the centerpiece of an exhibition, The Wedding of Auschwitz, which uses papers donated by her family to tell the couple’s heartbreaking story.
Friemel met Ferrer Rey in Spain after going there in 1936 to fight with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War against General Franco’s fascists.
After returning home, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
In the camp, he was used to repair SS vehicles and was held “under better conditions than other prisoners,” according to Vienna’s Social Democratic Mayor Michael Ludwig, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue.
But why the Nazis granted the Friemels, their bitter enemies, “such a unique privilege of being able to marry remains a mystery to this day,” added Ludwig.
– escape attempt –
“What I find most interesting is that we see there was love amidst the horror,” the couple’s grandson, Rodolphe Friemel, told AFP from his home in southern France.
He wondered whether “perhaps my grandparents only did all this to see each other again” since Margarita was allowed to travel from Vienna to Auschwitz for the wedding with her son and Friemel’s father, who was born in 1941.
The marriage was registered at 11:00 a.m. on March 18, 1944, when the slaughter in the camp was at its peak.
Around a million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau, as were homosexuals, prisoners of war and other victims of persecution by the German Nazi regime.
Friemel, 48, gave the wedding documents, including messages of congratulations from other inmates, to the Vienna City Library earlier this year to ensure their preservation.
His grandfather was allowed to wear civilian clothes and let his hair grow for the occasion, and the couple was given a cell in the camp’s brothel for the wedding night.
But the respite was short-lived. Rudolf Friemel was hanged in December 1944 for helping organize an escape attempt. The camp was liberated a month later.
All that was left for his wife and child – who moved to France after the war – were his heartbreaking letters and poems.
The show runs until the end of the month in the Vienna City Library.
