Michele Ohayon’s Steal a Pencil For Me, like her previous documentary, Cowboy Del Amor, is a bittersweet paen to love born from startling circumstances. Whereas Cowboy delved into the surprisingly successful relationships arranged for a fee between American men and Mexican women, Pencil tells the story of two Dutch Jews from different social classes whose love blossomed in the most unlikely of places: a concentration camp

The poor, married Jaap meets young diamond heiress Ina at a dinner party; the two chat all night with the assumption that, due to Ina’s elevated social class and Jaap’s ball and chain, they’ll never meet again. Soon after, Jaap and badly matched wife Manja are deported to Westerbork, a detainment camp where Jews lived in relative comfort before being shipped off to the labor/death camps. Ina is sent to the same camp several months later. With his wife living in the same barracks, Jaap begins a tentative relationship with Ina, based on late night walks and furtive “necking.” When Manja finds out about the affair, she forbids it, and Ina and Jaap carry on by writing letters. Ina and Jaap are eventually sent to Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died, but are separated before the liberation. When they reunite in June of 1945, Jaap immediately moves to get a divorce so that they can marry. They’ve been together ever since.

Ohayon’s film combines the present-day talking-head recollections of Jaap and Ina (now in their 90s and 80s, respectively) with passages from their letters, read aloud in English by actors with soft Dutch accents. There’s some amazing archival propaganda footage from Westerbork, which portrays life in the camp as a swirl of smiling children and casual football games. In the most affecting portions of the film, Ohayon’s camera accompanies Jaap and Ina first to their childhood homes, and then to modern-day Westerbork.

While in the camp, Jaap could barely acknowledge the reality that every week, his friends and family members were packed onto trains and sent off to die. Upon his return 60 years later, the horrid fates met by so many is impossible to ignore, and yet many of his memories of the camp share the halcyon glow of the propaganda footage. This camp, and the Holocaust as a whole, made his sixty year marriage to woman who would otherwise be far out of his league a reality.

It’s an idiosyncratic, largely anecdotal story with larger reverberations. Ohayon tells the entire story of WWII and the Holocaust in a single, succinct narrative. It’s not nearly a visceral in its minutia, nor as far-reaching in its scope, but in terms of emotional focus, Steal A Pencil For Me puts Ken Burn’s The War to shame.

Steal a Pencil For Me opens today at the Quad in NYC. It expands to Los Angeles and other cities in the coming weeks, and will soon be available on DVD via Netflix. For more information, check out its website.