Given what we know today about the Nazi concentration camps of World War II, it is difficult to think of them as anything other than the places where millions of lives were destroyed. Indeed, it is almost too difficult to think of them as places where life struggled to press on and love could blossom.

It’s this sense of persistence and hope that resonates most powerfully in Michéle Ohayon’s new documentary “Steal a Pencil for Me,” a film that lacks in production value what it more than makes up for in one hell of a story. At its center are the diaries of Jack Polak and Ina Soep, which were published in 2000 and paint pictures not just of shower rooms and ghettos, but of the day-today struggles that were sometimes overcome and sometimes not by so many thousands of prisoners.

In our history books, those struggles don’t usually include finding love and holding onto it, but “Steal a Pencil for Me” is not simply a slice of history in which life is threatened on a grand scale. “I’m a very special Holocaust survivor,” Mr. Polak says at the beginning of the film. “I was in a camp with my wife and my girlfriend — and believe me, it was not easy.”

Finding himself in an unhappy marriage with a woman named Manja in June of 1943, Mr. Polack began an unlikely affair with Ms. Soep at a casual party in Amsterdam. Through some bizarre twist of fate, the affair continued at the Dutch transit camp of Westerbork, where the pair was forced to live only three months later by the Nazis. Knowing that he loved Ms. Soep more than he loved his wife, Mr. Polak began writing his girlfriend late-night letters that would be delivered under her pillow. In the months and years that followed, through all the unspeakable ordeals that would plague Ina and Jack first at Westerbork and later at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (where Anne Frank died), the two wrote passionately of a future together, of one day being able to do more than use pencil stubs to scribble out sweet nothings. Granted, there isn’t much suspense as to the outcome of their story. We meet Jack and Ina as they prepare for a 60th wedding anniversary celebration, and see in their gathered friends and family an outpouring of love for a couple who overcame unthinkable odds.

Yet this love story is only one dimension of Ms. Ohayon’s film, merely the connecting tissue for an intimate look at the way a generation of people tried to maintain some sense of civility and humanity in the most inhumane places imaginable. When the Nazis first came knocking in middle-of-the-night raids, Mr. Polak recalls, Jewish houses were raided of all belongings by the next morning. Thus, being seized by the SS did not merely mean relocation, but the obliteration of one’s home and life to that point. Whatever people packed for the journey was now the sum total of their possessions, so the camps they were taken to literally became their new homes.

Ironically, in the case of Jack and Ina, this breaking down of the Jewish class system was essential: Jack was raised in a poor family and Ina in a wealthy one, so it would have been nearly impossible for them to marry in peaceful times.

As their writings are read aloud in the documentary, we begin to feel the pulse of the camps. Each week revolved around Tuesday, when a transport would leave, taking any number of Jews to their deaths. In the days leading up to Tuesday, prisoners would dread the impending reading of the list of names. In the days after, a calm would fall over the campers who had evaded the journey. In a morbid routine, Tuesday nights were set aside for the camp’s weekly talent show, in which prisoners would perform for their captors. Prized performers, Ms. Soep says, never seemed to be chosen for the weekly trains.

The camp had its own elementary school, which Jack helped to run, and its own peculiar form of social life. Occasionally, after 12 hours of work and before the final siren of the night, Jack and Ina would walk down the road in the middle of the camp, ambling past other couples who would kiss in the darkness each night. Then the siren would sound, they would be forced to return to their beds, and they would write to each other, ignoring their emaciated bodies and their medical ailments and focusing on their visions of a shared future.

Today, Ina and Jack (who’s Chairman Emeritus of the Anne Frank Center) speak to youngsters about the privilege of living in freedom. It’s a sentiment that’s been committed to film so many times before, but there’s something about “Steal a Pencil for Me” that seems new and enlightening, something unnerving about the way it leaves one pondering what it is like to live with the threat of violent death looming constantly overhead. More than that, it makes one wonder how many other Jacks and Inas were out there, dreaming of futures together that would never arrive.

ssnyder@nysun.com