Rebecca and Joseph
met and got married secretly in the Plashow Concentration Camp On
Feb. 13, 1944. This is their story. Joseph worked as a draftsman
in the construction office. One day the Nazi supervisor ordered
him to make a sun print out of one of the drawings. Nowadays this
kind of a copy is done by machines, but in those days it was made
using the sun. The original drawing was
placed on a wooden frame and a special paper that
was sensitive to sun rays was placed under it. The sun rays made
the copy and then it had to be developed. Joseph told the Nazi
that there was no sun that day, it was winter and very cloudly
and that the copy wouldn't come out. But that Nazi who was an
expert in murder but not too skilled as a builder said: "Either
a print or a bullet in the head". Joseph had no other choice
so he went outside with the wooden frame and the map together
with the special paper underneath it. There was no sun so Bau
aimed the big frame with the drawing backed by the light
sensitive paper at the cloudy sky, waiting in vain for the sun to
emerge. At that fateful moment, a pretty girl came out of the
office and asked him: "What are you doing?" Later on
she told him that she thought that he was signaling to American
airplanes. Joseph answered her: "I am waiting for the
relucant sun to come out. Could you, perhaps, take her place?"
and aimed the frame at her. She blushed and ran away. This was
Joseph's first meeting with his future wife, Rebecca, his life's
sunshine.
After she had fled Joseph knew that he had only a few moments to live since the copy couldn't have come out, so he went back to the office and put the drawing in the developer and was very surprised to see that the copy was successful. He understood that the beautiful girl was indeed his sun. On the next morning he gathered a bouquet of wild flowers, which he smuggled inside in his cap, and went to thank her. When he entered her office one of the clerks jumped and grabbed the flowers from his hands and squashed them and threw them into the waste basket and told him: "Get out of here, you nut! Don't you know that the commandant, Amon Goeth, is in the next room? If he sees you with flowers he will shoot you on the spot!" and with these words he shoved him outside.
A few days later,
Joseph met his sun substitute while waiting in line for soup. She
told him that after Amon Goeth had left the office the clerk took
out the flowers from the waste basket and gave them to her
telling her who they were from. Later they kissed for the first 
time, in full moonlight, behind the latrine. Their
courtship lasted through actions and selections during which they
barely avoided a permanant parting several times. It took a
series of miracles for both of them to survive.
One day Joseph told Rebecca: "You know what, let's get married!" She said:"You must be crazy, to get married here inside the camp!" but Joseph covinced her by saying that what did they have to lose, who knows how long they would live. So he saved his daily bread of four days and traded it for a silver spoon, and for four more slices he gave the spoon to a jeweler who crafted two rings from it. On the chosen night, when the women came back from their forced labour walking through the men's camp Rebecca whistled their whistle. Joseph put a white kerchief on his head, the way women wore it. (men in the camp wore caps). He stood between his mother and his bride and that's how they smuggled him into the women's camp. Beside his mother's bunk they got married secretly. There was no rabbi, no geusts or music and no mayonnaise salad. Joseph just pronounced the traditional "Harei at mekudeshet li..." and his mother gave them her blessing. Then they went to Rebecca's hut to consumate their marriage. They climbed up to her pallet on the third tier and waited impatiently for the lights to go out, but they didn't. Someone asked why and the barrack's elder said that the Germans were coming to search if there were any concealed men. Rebecca and her two neighbors covered Joseph with all sorts of rags that usually served them as pillows, and he lay beneath their heads while the three of them pretended to be asleep. Of course, they couldn't sleep because they were filled with terror, and their pillow was shaking under their heads. When the search was over they heard the screams of two boys who were beaten to death. Only a miracle saved him from being discovered.
Then he heard the
siren calling all the men in the camp to the mustering grounds.
He knew that the Germans would kill all his friends 
upon discovering that he was missing. So again he
covered his head with the white kerchief, jumped down from the
third pallet and ran to the gate. But the gate was closed. At
this second he decided that he didn't have much to lose, he was
cosidered dead anyway, and he jumped on the electrfied fence
thinking that that was a swifter and more dignified way to die.
And at this moment there was another miracle as he climbed over
the fence and the searchlight missed him and only one of his
trouser legs was torn.
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. Joseph didn't discoverwhat 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. "My husband was more important to me than I was, and I wasn't afraid," she said.
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.
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. During a selection, Joseph Mengele took a red spot on her breast to be a sign of illness and pointed her to the line of those to be gassed. She went in the direction of the line, but circled back to the group of naked women still to be examined. Thrice she presented herself and was selected for death. The last time Mengele recognized her and became furious, but she wasn't afraid. She told him she wasn't sick, that the pimple was because she was menstruating. Dubious, because he said women in the camps stopped having periods, Mengele had a Polish woman perform a test with a rag. When the Polish woman verified her story, "the Angel of Death" relented and let Rebecca go to the line of the living.
After the war Joseph and Rebecca found each other in a miraculous way. You can read about it in Joseph Bau's book: "Dear God! Have you ever gone hungry?" on page 159 "A fateful reunion". They legally got married on Feb. 13, 1946, two years to the day from their unofficial camp wedding.