Remarkable Concentration Camp Wedding Featured in ‘Bau, Artist at War’

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO — Scheduled to open Sept. 26 in theaters around San Diego (AMC, Angelika, Cinepolis, Regal, The Lot) is a remarkable Holocaust movie, Bau, Artist At War revealing the initial meeting, romance, and surreptitious wedding of Joseph Bau (Emile Hirsch) and Rebecca Tannenbaum (Inbar Levi) in a women’s barracks at the Plaszow Concentration Camp .

Although this noteworthy wedding was briefly shown in Steven Spielberg’s classic movie Schindler’s List, Director Sean McNamara believed rightly the relationship between Tannenbaum and Bau deserved a movie of its own.

In 1971 Bau testified in a Vienna courtroom against the sadistic Nazi guard Franz Gruen (Yan Tual), who had first encountered Bau in the Jewish ghetto of Krakow, Poland, prior to its liquidation. Ever since, Gruen nursed a personal hatred for Bau and would have killed him, except for the intervention of the camp’s evil commandant Amon Goeth (Josh Blacker), who needed Bau’s skills as a graphic artist and calligrapher.

Bau had additional talents as a forger. Before his incarceration, he forged passports for the Polish Resistance. After liberation, he forged passports for Israel’s spy agency, Mossad, allowing its operatives to slip unobtrusively into various countries.

Rebecca, meanwhile, served as a nurse in a Krakow Hospital until she too was rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Plaszow.

Forging was not Bau’s only other talent; he was quite a cartoonist. Working in Goeth’s outer office, he was able to help himself to pads of paper which he used as flip charts to picture the camp guards’ imagined humiliation, which were very popular viewing among prisoners. Rebecca worked as Goeth’s personal manicurist, effecting a docile, timid persona while secretly she spied on Goeth’s activities.

Bau was a jokester, keeping up the spirits of his fellow prisoners with clever wisecracks. When Rebecca’s younger brother was on the verge of committing suicide by throwing himself against Plaszow’s electrified fence, Bau questioning whether the boy was so thrift-minded he wanted to save the Nazis a bullet. He successfully urged the youth to resist and to upon liberation tell the story of the Nazis’ depravity. Rebecca watched the exchange from a distance. It was the beginning of her romantic interest in Bau.

The couple later took chances meeting each other. One of the most audacious meetings came when Bau fashioned a bonnet from a cloth and posed as a woman to visit Rebecca’s barracks, delighting her fellow female prisoners. Later, he proposed marriage, and when Rebecca accepted, the engagement was short. Some of the women, including Bau’s mother, were in on the surprise, and they spread a makeshift chuppah between two beds. Bau’s mother officiated the wedding. The couple consummated their marriage in the second level of a three-tiered bunk as her fellow prisoners discreetly looked away.

Factory owner Oskar Schindler (Edward Foy) forged an alliance with Goeth’s Jewish office workers, especially with the accountant Itzhak (Adam Tsekhman), who headed a Resistance cell at the labor camp. Schindler talked the corrupt Goeth into supplying prisoners for his factory, at a price, saving hundreds of Jews in the process.

Gruen, on the strength of Bau’s testimony, was convicted of war crimes in 1971 and spent the rest of his life in prison.  Goeth was executed, not by the Allies but by the Nazis who discovered he was holding back his ill-gotten gains instead of forwarding them to Berlin.

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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World