Married in Auschwitz. 80th anniversary of the only known wedding in the camp

The union was sealed on March 18, 1944, under the law of the Third Reich. The wedding ceremony was attended by the Margarita's and Rudolf's 3-year-old son Edouard as well as the groom's father and brother.

The married couple were allowed to spend the wedding night in a cell inside the camp brothel located in Block 24. The following day, Margarita and little Edouard headed back home.

A camp orchestra provided music accompaniment, while Wilhelm Brasse - a Polish inmate - took photographs of the newlyweds.

Before the ceremony, the groom had been allowed to grow his hair back and borrowed a suit, tie, and shoes from the SS wardrobe.

Born in 1907, Rudolf Friemel was an Austrian communist. Margarita was nine years younger. The two met during the Spanish Civil War. Friemel went there to fight with the International Brigades in 1936 against General Franco's fascists. Ferrer Rey was part of Mujeres Antifascistas, an organization of anti-fascist women who came to cheer up the soldiers during the fighting. The pair got married for the first time in Spain, under the republican law.

After the fall of the Spanish Republic, Friemel and Rey fled to France in separate ways. There, after being interned, they got separated once again. Their son was born in 1941. Margarita found shelter at Rudolf's father's place in Vienna. Rudolf tried to join them, but he got arrested by the Nazis. After being held in various prisons, he was taken to Auschwitz in the first months of 1942.

German authorities, having supported General Francisco Franco, did not recognize the law of the collapsed republic, including marriage certificates issued under said code. Friemel's father and Margarita made efforts so that Rudolf could get married under German law. He was granted that privilege by SS Chief Heinrich Himmler himself.

Margarita and Friemel's family were allowed to come to Auschwitz. The wedding ceremony was organized in the commandant's building, which also housed the camp's registry office.

A leader of the prisoner resistance, the Austrian did not survive WWII. The Germans hanged him on December 30, 1944, after his unsuccessful escape attempt. He died wearing the very shirt he had got married in. Female inmates had embroided the shirt with roses on the occassion. His wife and son survived the war.

Margarita died in 1987.

The Germans set up the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940. Two years later, Auschwitz II-Birkenau was constructed. It became the place of genocide of the European Jews. The entire camp complex included a network of more than 40 sub-camps that exploited the prisoners as slave laborers.

It is estimated that at least 1.1 million people were murdered in Auschwitz, mainly Jews but also Poles, the Romani, Soviet POWs, and people of other nationalities.