TEL AVIV — She survived the gas chambers of Auschwitz because an SS officer fell in love with her, and decades later she stood in a Vienna courtroom to testify on his behalf. Helena Citronova, a Slovak Jew deported to the Nazi death camp in 1942, died in Tel Aviv in 2007 at the age of 84, but her extraordinary story of survival, forbidden love and moral reckoning remains one of the most haunting and complex accounts to emerge from the Holocaust.
Citronova was born on August 26, 1922, in Humenné, then part of Czechoslovakia, one of four children of Jewish parents. Her father worked as a cantor, and Helena loved to sing and dance. Her older brother joked that one day he would take her to Prague to cultivate her talent.
That future was never to be.
In 1934, Helena’s sister Rojka and her husband immigrated to Palestine, but unable to find work there, they returned to Czechoslovakia in 1939 with their daughter. Jews in Palestine had warned them not to go back. “What are you crazy?
There’s a war brewing,” they were told. By the time the family realized their mistake, it was too late.
On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. In April 1940, Slovakia passed its first aryanization law, seizing Jewish-owned property and excluding Jews from the economy. On September 9, 1941, the Slovak government passed the Jewish Code, a set of 270 articles that propaganda boasted was the strictest anti-Jewish legislation in Europe, longer than the Slovak Constitution itself.
The code denied Jews their rights, barred them from public life, restricted their movements and shopping hours, required them to wear the yellow star, annulled all debts owed to them and confiscated their property. For the Jews of Slovakia, the worst was yet to come. According to a census of December 15, 1940, there were 89,000 Jews living in the country.
In March 1942, the Slovak State signed an agreement with Germany permitting the deportation of its Jewish citizens. Slovakia became the first state outside direct German control to agree to the deportation of its own Jewish population. Between March and October 1942, some 58,000 Slovak Jews were concentrated in labor and concentration camps, then transported to the border and handed over to German SS and police units.
The Hlinka Guard, the Slovak State Police, participated willingly. Victims were given only four hours’ warning to prevent escape. Beatings and forcible shaving were commonplace, as were invasive searches for hidden valuables.
Some members of the Hlinka Guard took advantage of their power to rape Jewish women. President Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest, gave a speech justifying the deportations. Hitler later remarked, “It is interesting how this little Catholic priest Tiso is sending us the Jews.”
Nearly all deported Slovak Jews were killed in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor and other locations in German-occupied Poland. Only about 300 of the Jews deported from Slovakia in 1942 survived. The Slovak State paid Germany 500 Reichsmarks for every deported Jew, ostensibly for “retraining and accommodation.”
During the war, German and Slovak authorities deported more than 70,000 Jews from Slovakia. More than 60,000 were murdered. By the end of the Holocaust, more than two-thirds of Slovakia’s Jewish population had been killed.
On March 25, 1942, Helena Citronova was among 997 teenage girls and unmarried young women deported on the first official transport of Jews to Auschwitz. Slovak authorities told them they were going away to do government work for just a few months. In reality, the Jewish girls and women were sold to the Germans for 500 Reichsmarks each, about $200 a piece, as slave labor.
They arrived in Auschwitz on March 26, 1942. At first, Helena worked in an outdoor command unit demolishing buildings and shifting rubble. She slept on bug-ridden straw and watched in terror as the women around her began to give up hope and die.
“We weren’t allowed to run, so when a wall came down, the first girls were crushed and died on the spot,” she later recalled.
On October 30, 1942, Helena began working at Canada Warehouse, sorting the possessions of murdered Jews. It was named after Canada because that country was thought to be a land of great riches. Inmates’ belongings were taken from them upon arrival and brought there to be sorted and sent back to Germany, though some were stolen by SS guards.
Working at Canada Warehouse was one of the few sought-after jobs in Auschwitz because prisoners received food and water, could grow their hair out and were not beaten.
That same day, Helena participated in a musical performance by a group of prisoners. She sang with passion, believing it might be the last time she would ever get to sing. When she finished, Franz Wunsch, one of the SS personnel responsible for overseeing the sorting tasks at Canada Warehouse, approached her and asked her to sing the song again.
Helena later recalled looking up with tears in her eyes and seeing a uniform. She thought, “God, where are the eyes of a murderer? These are the eyes of a human being.”
Wunsch had fallen in love with her.
As SS personnel, Wunsch visited Helena often. He was gentle, kind and protective. He brought her extra food and clothing and turned over his own food rations to her.
When Helena was infected with typhus, he hid her and nursed her back to health. He made sure she was well fed and even gave her food that his mother had sent him. Wunsch helped save the lives of her fellow prisoners, risking his own life with his superiors in the SS.
Sometimes he passed her a note saying, “I fell in love with you.”
Helena later recalled, “I thought I’d rather be dead than be involved with an SS man.” She despised the Nazis, not only for what they did to the Jews but also because she lost her parents and brother at Auschwitz. Her brother, while attempting to escape the camp, was killed on the electrified fence, his face and hands pressed and immobilized against the barbed wire.
Over time, however, Helena began to develop some affection for Wunsch in return. A turning point came when Wunsch was able to help Helena’s sister Rojka, a mother of two who was transported to Auschwitz from Slovakia with her 9-year-old daughter and newborn son.
Helena heard about their arrival and ran to the crematorium where she feared they would be killed. She hysterically told the guards that she wanted to die with them. A friend had alerted Wunsch, who rushed to the scene just as Josef Mengele, the notorious SS physician known as the Angel of Death, was deciding which prisoners would live or die.
When Wunsch arrived at the crematorium, he began to violently beat Helena for the crime of violating camp rules. While beating her, he secretly whispered to her, “Tell me quickly what your sister’s name is before I’m too late.” Helena replied, “You won’t be able to.
She came with two little children.” Wunsch then told her, “Children, that’s different. Children can’t live here.”
Immediately after, he ran to the crematorium to find Rojka. While Wunsch was able to save her by saying that she worked for him in Canada Warehouse, he could do nothing for her children. They were murdered in the gas chamber.
The romance between Helena and Franz secretly continued. Helena was once interrogated and tortured about their relationship, but she refused to confirm its existence. She knew that if she revealed the relationship, they would both be executed.
She later said, “There were moments where I forgot that I was a Jew and that he was not a Jew, and honestly in the end I loved him. But it could not be realistic.”
The precise nature of their romance, which lasted until the final evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945, has never been made clear. According to some witnesses, it was not sexual. Holocaust survivor Badev Dagan recalled that the couple never had 𝒔𝒆𝒙, as inmates slept in bunks stacked on top of each other in rows of three, and it would have been impossible.
Equally out of the question was the chance of Citronova visiting the officers’ headquarters without being caught.
After the war, a former Auschwitz female prisoner said of Wunsch, “He didn’t do anything bad to us, but he was sadistic towards men. Until he met Helena, he hit and kicked women too, but afterwards it was enough for him to beat only men. He often beat them with a stick that he carried with him.
Helena had a positive influence on him, and she tried to make him behave not so cruelly.”
However, after the war, one Holocaust survivor testified that during the Jewish revolt in Auschwitz on October 7, 1944, Wunsch without mercy shot a 20-year-old Greek Jew.
The relationship ended in January 1945 as the Soviet Army was approaching Auschwitz. During their last conversation, Franz told her, “Take care, Helena. You’ll make it.
I’ve loved you so much.” Then they kissed long and intimately.
On January 27, 1945, the Soviet Army entered Auschwitz, Birkenau and Monowitz and liberated about 7,000 prisoners, most of whom were ill and dying. One of the prisoners liberated by the Red Army was Helena Citronova.
For the next 27 years, she and Franz would not see each other. After the war, Helena married a Zionist activist, moved with him to Israel and had two children. Wunsch searched for Helena for years, but she avoided the letters he wrote her.
He settled in Austria, got married and started his own family.
In 1972, Franz Wunsch, then 50 years old, was put on trial for war crimes. Helena, then a married woman and mother of two, received a desperately written request from his wife and traveled to Vienna to testify on his behalf, despite threats from Jewish rights activists. She considered it her duty to outline the good things he had done at Auschwitz, but she also confirmed that she had witnessed him committing crimes against other prisoners.
In court, Helena spoke slowly without emotion and not once did she look at Wunsch. However, when it came to her sister Rojka’s children, she could not continue. The words caught in her throat.
At that moment, Wunsch started to cry. He later repented, saying he had not killed anyone and regretted having beaten prisoners.
Despite what the judge called overwhelming evidence of guilt in the participation of mass murder, Wunsch was acquitted on all counts. He and Helena never saw each other again.
Franz Wunsch died of natural causes on February 23, 2009. He was 86 years old. Helena Citronova was 84 years old when she died on June 4, 2007, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Her story endures as a testament to the impossible choices forced upon victims of the Holocaust, the blurred lines between perpetrator and protector, and the enduring question of how love could exist in a place designed for death. There were many tears shed for Helena Citronova.