Helena Citronova was born on August 26, 1922, in Humenne, then part of Czechoslovakia. She was one of four children of Jewish parents. Her father was a cantor, and Helena loved not only to sing but also to dance. Her older brother joked that one day he would take her to Prague to develop her talent.
In 1934, Helena's sister Roika immigrated to Palestine with her husband. Because he could not find work there, the two decided in 1939 to return to Czechoslovakia with their daughter. Jews in Palestine had warned them, asking if they were crazy because a war was brewing. By the time the family realized their mistake, it was too late.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In April 1940, the first aryanization law was passed in Slovakia, seizing Jewish-owned property and excluding Jews from the economy. This was justified by the stereotype, reinforced by propaganda, that Jews obtained their wealth by oppressing Slovaks.
On September 9, 1941, the Slovak government passed the Jewish Code. Government propaganda boasted that it was the strictest set of anti-Jewish laws in Europe. Based on the Nazi Nuremberg laws, it comprised 270 articles and was longer than the Slovak Constitution.
The law comprehensively denied rights to Slovak Jews and definitively excluded them from public life. It restricted the hours they were allowed to travel and shop and barred them from clubs, organizations, and public events. It also required Jews to wear the yellow star, annulled all debts owed to Jews, and confiscated Jewish property.
When some government members disagreed with the introduction of national socialism in Slovakia, Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka said, "I am not a Democrat." For the Slovak Jews, however, the worst was yet to come.
According to a census of December 15, 1940, there were 89,000 Jews in Slovakia. In March 1942, the Slovak State signed an agreement with Germany that permitted the deportation of Slovak Jews. Slovakia was the first state outside of direct German control to agree to the deportation of its Jewish citizens.
Between March and October 1942, some 58,000 Slovak Jews were concentrated in indigenously established labor and concentration camps, mainly at Sered, Novaky, and Vyhne. The Slovak authorities then transported the Jews to the border of the Government General or the German Reich and turned them over to German SS and police.
The Hlinka Guard and Slovak State Police most willingly participated in these deportations. Victims were given only four hours' warning to prevent them from escaping. Beatings and forcible shaving were commonplace, as were invasive searches to uncover hidden valuables. Some members of the Hlinka Guard took advantage of their power to rape Jewish women.
In 1942, Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and the Slovak president, gave a speech in which he justified the ongoing deportations of Slovak Jews. Hitler commented after his speech, saying it was interesting how this little Catholic priest Tiso was sending them the Jews.
Virtually all of the deported Slovak Jews were killed in Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor, and other locations in German-occupied Poland. Only 300 Jews deported in 1942 from Slovakia to Nazi death camps survived.
The Slovak State paid Germany 500 Reichsmarks for every deported Jew, for what they called retraining and accommodation. During the war, German and Slovak authorities deported more than 70,000 Jews from Slovakia. The Germans murdered more than 60,000 of them. By the end of the Holocaust, more than two-thirds of the Jews living in Slovakia had been murdered.
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 would be going away to do government work service for just a few months. The Jewish girls and women were actually sold to the Germans by the Slovaks for 500 Reichsmarks, about $200 apiece, as slave labor.
On March 26, 1942, they arrived in Auschwitz. 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 other women around her began to give up hope and die. She later recalled that they were not allowed to run, so when a wall came down the first girls were crushed and died on the spot.
On October 30, 1942, Helena started to work at the Canada Warehouse, sorting the possessions of murdered Jews. It was so named because Canada was thought to be a country of great riches. Inmates' possessions were taken from them upon arrival and brought there. The items were sorted and sent back to Germany, although some were stolen by the SS guards.
Working at the Canada Warehouse was one of the few sought-after jobs at Auschwitz because prisoners received food and water, could grow their hair out, and were not beaten. On the same day she started to work at the Canada Warehouse, Helena participated in a musical performance by a group of prisoners.
She was noticed by Franz Wunsch, one of the SS personnel responsible for overseeing the sorting tasks in the Canada warehouses. Helena sang with passion, as she believed it might be the last time she would ever get to sing. When Helena was done singing, Wunsch came up to her and asked her to please sing the song again.
Helena later recalled that she would look up with tears in her eyes and see a uniform and think, "God, where are the eyes of a murderer? These are the eyes of a human being." Wunsch fell in love with Helena.
As one of the SS personnel responsible for overseeing the sorting tasks in the Canada warehouses, Wunsch would visit Helena often. He was gentle, kind, and protective. He would bring her extra food and clothing and turned over his own food rations to her.
When Helena was infected with typhus, he would hide her and nurse her back to health. He made sure she was well fed and would even give her gifts of food that his mother had sent him. Wunsch would help 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 because of 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 up and immobilized against the barbed wire.
Over time, however, Helena started to develop some affection for Wunsch in return. A turning point came when Wunsch was able to help Helena's sister Roika, 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, decided which of the prisoners would live or die.
When Wunsch came to the crematorium, he began to violently beat Helena for the crime of violating SS rules. While he was 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 Helena's sister Roika. While Wunsch was able to save Roika by saying that she worked for him in the 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 would later say, "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.
According to Badev Dagan, a Holocaust survivor, the couple never had sex. As Dagan later recalled, 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 about 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 less 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 Helena avoided the letters he wrote her. Wunsch then 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, came to testify on his behalf after having received a desperately written request from his wife. She traveled to Vienna despite threats from Jewish rights activists because 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 Roika's children, she could not continue. The words caught in her throat. At that moment, Wunsch started to cry and later repented. He said he had not killed anyone and regretted having beaten the 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.