Joseph Bau, Israeli Artist, Animator, Holocaust Survivor, 81
DGH
Joseph Bau, a renowned Israeli artist and Holocaust survivor whose
secret marriage in a concentration camp in Poland was immortalized in
"Schindler's List" and whose own wartime efforts enabled more than 400
fellow Jews to escape, died May 24, 2002, at the age of 81, in a Tel
Aviv, Isreal, hospital, from pneumonia.
After immigrating to Israel in 1950, Bau became known in the media as
the Israeli Walt Disney for introducing animation to his new country. He
produced animated shorts for movie theaters and television, produced
animated public service announcements and created the opening and
closing titles and credits for virtually every Israeli movie made from
the 1950s through the '70s.
In his later years, Bau received acclaim for his oil paintings, which
have been exhibited in galleries and Jewish community centers across the
United States and Canada, bearing witness to the tragedies of the
Holocaust and the perseverance of hope in human nature.
Bau also wrote a well-received wartime memoir, "Dear God, Have You Ever
Gone Hungry?" The book, which is illustrated with his dramatic pen and
ink drawings, was published in Hebrew in 1982 and in English, by Arcade
Publishing, in 1998.
Despite the horrors, Bau viewed his wartime experiences as a series of
miracles, one of which was meeting his wife, Rebecca, in Plaszow, a
concentration camp on the outskirts of Krakow.
Bau didn't discover until decades later that his beloved, who was sent
to Auschwitz when Plaszow closed, had arranged to have his name added to
Schindler's list.
The son of middle-class, secular Jewish parents, Bau was born in Krakow,
Poland, in 1920.
He displayed artistic talent at an early age and entered Krakow
University as an art major in 1938.
His art studies came to an abrupt halt the next year, when German troops
invaded Poland and later herded Krakow's Jews into a walled ghetto.
While at the university, Bau had learned Gothic lettering, and his
ability landed him a job producing maps and signs for the Nazis, first
in the ghetto and then in Plaszow, where many of the prisoners worked in
the nearby factory run by Schindler.
Bau's job enabled him to forge documents and identity papers that
allowed more than 400 Jews to escape the ghetto and the camp.
Years later, when asked why he hadn't forged documents for himself, Bau
replied: "Then who would have done it for the other Jews?"
"He had a mission to save people," his daughter, Clila Bau-Cohen, said
by telephone from her home near Tel Aviv.
"We would say, 'Tell us, aren't you sad you had to go through this hell
for five years?' He said, 'If I did escape, how would I have met Mom?'
"That's how our parents raised us: In everything bad, there's always
something good coming out of it."
When Bau met 19-year-old Rebecca Tannenbaum, she was serving as
manicurist for Amon Goeth, the sadistic camp commandant who routinely
tortured the prisoners and shot them for sport.
He kept a gun at Rebecca's elbow, warning that he would shoot her if she
so much as nicked or scratched him.
For Jews in the camp, courtship could be just as lethal.
Knowing that couples who were caught merely holding hands would be
executed, Bau and Tannenbaum shared their first kiss at night behind the
latrine.
And even though any man who was caught in the women's camp after the
gate closed would be shot instantly, Bau went ahead with their
clandestine wedding.
He traded four loaves of bread for a silver spoon and paid four more
loaves to the jeweler in the camp watchmakers' shop to turn the silver
into two wedding rings.
Then, on the night of Feb. 13, 1944, Bau exchanged his striped cap for
the white kerchief that women used to cover their shaved heads and
sneaked into his mother's hut in the women's camp.
There, as he and his bride stood next to his mother's bunk, she
performed the unofficial wedding ceremony.
Bau later scoffed at Steven Spielberg's cinematic version of the
wedding, in which friends build a makeshift ceremonial wedding tent out
of a bedsheet held up by two brooms.
"That's complete nonsense," Bau told a reporter. "Whoever heard of
sheets in a camp -- we slept on rags."
After the ceremony, the newlyweds went to Rebecca's hut, where they
climbed up to her pallet on the third tier and waited for the lights to
go out. They never did: The Germans had begun searching the women's
quarters for concealed men.
It was too late for Bau to escape, so his bride and two of her bunk
mates covered him with the rags they usually used as pillows and he lay
hidden beneath their heads while they pretended to be asleep.
They knew the guards' search had ended when they heard the screams of
two young men who had been discovered and were beaten to death.
Only a miracle, Bau wrote in his memoir, had saved him from being
discovered.
But he knew he wasn't safe yet after hearing the blare of a siren
calling all the men in the camp to the mustering grounds.
Again covering his head with the white kerchief, Bau dashed out of the
hut only to discover that the electrified gate was closed.
As a searchlight swept by, he decided to risk leaping over the
electrified fence.
Score yet another miracle as he landed safely on the other side.
When Plaszow was being closed down and Schindler began drawing up his
now-famous list of Jews who would work at his new factory in
Czechoslovakia, Rebecca visited Goeth's Jewish male secretary to remind
him that he owed her a favor for the time she prevented a guard from
shooting his mother.
When the secretary started to write down her name on the list, Rebecca
substituted her husband's name.
Bau didn't find out what his wife had done until after the movie
"Schindler's List" was released in 1993.
Rebecca Bau told a reporter that she had had faith in her own survival
but feared for her husband.
"My husband was more important to me than I was, and I wasn't afraid,"
she said.
While Bau went to Czechoslovakia to work at Schindler's factory, his
wife was sent to Auschwitz, where she managed to talk her way out of
being sent to the gas chamber three times.
The Baus were reunited after the war and legally married Feb. 13, 1946,
two years to the day from their unofficial camp wedding.
"They always celebrated two dates," said Bau-Cohen. "They were such a
special couple."