Helen Spitzer Tichauer

In December 2019 The New York Times published an article on a previously undocumented aspect of her life in Auschwitz - 25 year old Tichauer had taken a 17 year old lover in Auschwitz, David Wisnia. The pair had been able to engage in monthly liaisons, and had planned to meet, and marry, if they should survive the war. However, they lost track of one another, for several years, and, when they had news of one another, they were both married.

Erwin Tichauer was an academic, a professor of bio-engineering, at the University of New South Wales, and New York University. Tichauer lived with him until his death in 1996.

Tichauer was one of the first women sent to Auschwitz in early 1942. Eventually Auschwitz camp authorities discovered Tichauer's skills as a graphics designer, which preserved her from being killed, and even allowed her relatively free-run of the camp, and even occasional excursions, outside the camp. Multiple historians have used Tichauer's account of life in Auschwitz. Konrad Kwiet contributed a biography of Tichauer as a chapter of “Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor”

Helen Tichauer (1918-2018) was a graphics designer, holocaust survivor and human rights worker. Tichauer was born in Pozsony, Austro-Hungarian Kingdom (now Bratislava, Slovakia), as Helen Spitzer, was kidnapped by the SS, and held in death camps, in Poland, lived in displaced persons camps in Germany, after the war. It was there that she married Erwin Tichauer, then the chief of security of her camp. The Tichauer were called upon by the United Nations on multiple humanitarian projects. Erwin Tichauer also served as a professor of bio-engineering, at University of New South Wales and New York University.