“Lovers in Auschwitz” is an incredible true story from a terrible time. The lovers of the title are Helen Zipora “Zippi” Spitzer, a young Jewish woman from Slovakia, and David Wisnia, a young Jewish man from Poland. While imprisoned at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Zippi managed to secure a position helping the commandants of the women’s camp, a role she tried to use to save other inmates; she also became romantically involved with David, a talented singer. After the war, Zippi and David were separated for decades, only to meet again at the end of Zippi’s life, when new secrets were revealed.

Keren Blankfeld’s book, which expands on a New York Times article, delves into life in wartime Bratislava and Warsaw and the inner workings of Auschwitz, but its focus lies squarely on its protagonists, Zippi and David. Their tale is compelling, though Blankfeld chooses to tell it in a way that some readers may find off-putting.

Zippi was a talented graphic designer with a penchant for reading people and thinking quickly; David was a skilled musician. We learn about Zippi’s prewar romantic relationship and her brother’s politics, and of David’s father’s refusal to go to America. We learn how Zippi’s and David’s respective skills served them well as very young adults while the worlds they knew changed forever, how they tried to make sense of the situation unfurling before them in Auschwitz and how they were able to have an intimate relationship in seemingly impossible circumstances.

Blankfeld does not break from telling Zippi and David’s story to unpack some of the broader questions it raises. She writes, for instance, of Zippi’s friend Katya having an “affair” with Gerhard Palitzsch, a high-ranking SS officer. But can such language even be used to describe a relationship between a Nazi and a person who was, even if she’d obtained relative power, a prisoner? Blankfeld doesn’t explore this. We are also told repeatedly that appearances mattered in Auschwitz. (“To avoid death,” Zippi “had to exhibit health; she had to look good, to the extent that was possible.”) Looking healthy was also a necessity for securing better jobs within the camp. In one of those positions, Zippi wielded her perfectionist skills to create a “pre-check” for the SS guards to use before taking roll call each morning. “This meant inmates, guards, and the SS could all sleep a bit longer,” Blankfeld writes. “Supervisors kept better control of their inmates and made fewer mistakes in their reports to Berlin. As far as Zippi could tell, everybody won.” Of course, readers and Blankfeld know that making things more efficient for the Nazis could also make things worse for prisoners, but by maintaining Zippi’s perspective, the author doesn’t linger to explicitly address this paradox….

The book covers not only their meeting and courtship in a concentration camp, but also their parting and what came after: how they were supposed to meet again, but didn’t, and how they married other people and grew older, their paths potentially crossing but never doing so — until, finally, they did.

Blankfeld writes in her notes on sources that Zippi did not mention David at all in formal interviews that she gave to others while she was alive, though she informally acknowledged the relationship to two different historians with whom Blankfeld spoke. This is to say that Zippi did not decide herself to enter the story of her relationship with David into the historical record, and certainly not as the central narrative of her life. Blankfeld writes: “I believe that her story of strength and self-sacrifice deserves to be told. In addition, the story of her romance with David in Auschwitz offers a spark of hope in a world of darkness —and the richness of their lives beyond Auschwitz is every bit as much of an inspiration.” Readers can decide for themselves what they make of this choice, and whether Blankfeld’s book was the best way to tell the story.

Zippi and David are both lovingly rendered. And in focusing on them, the book does implicitly honor the full humanity of two survivors — recapturing the texture of their origins, their hopes and dreams, and their complex lives, rather than merely their presence at one of history’s most unfathomable, tragic episodes.