Edek Galinski and Mala Zimetbaum were real young people in Auschwitz. They fell in love in the infamous concentration camp.

They escaped, but were recaptured six weeks later. Edek was hanged, and Mala, who attempted suicide after slashing her wrists, was eventually murdered in a crematorium furnace.

“We wanted to render history in pictures to show the story of Auschwitz from the inside, through the life stories of specific people. We wanted to bring them back to life – as they are recalled by ex-inmates, witnesses to their lives,” Jacek Lech, the book’s publisher said.

Witnesses such as Auschwitz prisoner 121 Jozef Paczynski helped in the creation of the work. He spent more than five years there and knew Edek and Mala. He remembers their story and other similar ones, since Nazi guards punished affairs with death.

“The SS troops were making sure there’d be no contact between men and women. But it was impossible to do. You know what it’s like: a man, a woman, a walk, a smile… these are impossible to stop,” Jozef recalled.

Beata Klos, the comic’s editor, keeps a record of ex-prisoners’ stories and selects them for publication.

“The author of the drawings and the writer took a lot of photographs, so the buildings actually resemble the real ones. They would be held here for weeks, months, interrogated, tortured, just waiting here for execution,” she said.

The book is aimed at younger people who may know little or nothing about the horrors of the Nazis.

“We focus on fragments of Auschwitz stories and tell them in a way that is attractive to young readers. They then realize that this happened not that long ago and to real people,” Michal Galek, the comic book writer explained.

School children on a visit from Slovakia told RT that the comics help their understanding of history:

“It’s more interesting to see pictures than to read a story. If we see illustrations we will better understand what happened and how people behaved in those conditions,” Lea said

“It is a good idea. And it’s remarkable to see that two people could fall in love in such a place,” Michael added.

The picture book images cannot truly reflect the suffering that went on behind the barbed wire, but comic book drawings can be understood by the young. And these may give them a glimpse of that horror and hopefully an impulse to never forget what happened at Auschwitz.