Helena Citrónová was 19 years old when Slovak authorities herded her onto a train bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in March 1942, one of 997 young Jewish women sold to the Germans for 500 Reichsmarks apiece as slave labor, and she would survive the Holocaust not through luck alone but because an SS officer whose job was to oversee the plunder of murdered Jews fell in love with her voice, her spirit, and her face.
Her story, preserved in survivor testimony and court records, stands as one of the most haunting and morally complicated accounts to emerge from the Second World War, a tale of survival purchased at an unbearable price and of a romance that should have been impossible inside the machinery of genocide.
Citrónová was born on August 26, 1922, in Humenné, then part of Czechoslovakia, one of four children of Jewish parents. Her father was a cantor. She loved to sing and dance, and her older brother joked that one day he would take her to Prague to show off her talent.
That future was annihilated by history.
Her sister Róžika had immigrated to Palestine in 1934 with her husband, but the couple returned to Czechoslovakia in 1939 after he failed to find work, despite warnings from Palestinian Jews that a war was brewing. By the time the family understood their mistake, it was too late. Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and the world changed forever.
In Slovakia, the regime of Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest and president, moved methodically against its Jewish citizens. The first aryanization law in April 1940 seized Jewish property and excluded Jews from the economy. Then, 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 stripped Jews of their rights, barred them from clubs and public events, restricted the hours they could travel and shop, required them to wear the yellow star, annulled all debts owed to them, and confiscated their property. When some government members objected to the importation of national socialism, Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka declared flatly: “I am not a Democrat.”
For the roughly 89,000 Jews counted in Slovakia in December 1940, the worst was yet to come. In March 1942, the Slovak State signed an agreement with Germany permitting the deportation of its Jewish citizens, becoming the first state outside direct German control to agree to hand over its own people. Between March and October 1942, some 58,000 Slovak Jews were concentrated in camps at Sereď and Vyhne before being transported to the border and turned over to German SS and police.
The Hlinka Guard, the Slovak State Police, participated eagerly. 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 used their power to rape Jewish women.
President Tiso gave a speech in 1942 justifying the ongoing deportations. Hitler, after hearing it, remarked with grim amusement: “It is interesting how this little Catholic priest Tiso is sending us the Jews.” Virtually all of the deported Slovak Jews were killed at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibór, 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, describing the payment as covering “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.
Helena Citrónová was on the first official transport of Jewish women to Auschwitz, told by Slovak authorities that they were going away to do government work for just a few months. They arrived on March 26, 1942. At first she worked in an outdoor command unit demolishing buildings and shifting rubble, sleeping on bug-ridden straw, watching in terror as women around her gave up hope and died.
“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, everything changed. That day Helena began work at the Canada Warehouse, the sorting facility where the possessions of murdered Jews were processed. It was named Canada because that country was thought to be a land of great riches.
Inmates’ belongings were taken from them upon arrival, brought to the warehouse, sorted, and sent back to Germany, though some were stolen by SS guards. Working at Canada was one of the most 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 the Canada warehouses, approached her and asked her to sing the song again.
Helena later recalled looking up with tears in her eyes, seeing a uniform, and thinking: “God, where are the eyes of a murderer? These are the eyes of a human being.”
Wunsch fell in love with her. He visited her often, 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 gifts of food that his mother had sent him. He 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 because she lost her parents and brother at Auschwitz. Her brother, 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 began to develop some affection for Wunsch in return. A turning point came when Wunsch was able to help her sister Róžika, 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 he was beating her, he secretly whispered to her: “Tell me quickly what your sister’s name is before it’s too late.”
Helena replied: “You won’t be able to. She came with two little children.”
Wunsch told her: “Children, that’s different. Children can’t live here.”
Immediately after, he ran to the crematorium to find Róžika. While Wunsch was able to save her 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 it, 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 Batsheva 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 Citrónová 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 Citrónová.
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.
But 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. But when it came to her sister Róžika’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 Citrónová was 84 years old when she died on June 4, 2007, in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Their story endures as a testament to the impossible choices forced upon people in the darkest chapter of human history, a reminder that even within the machinery of extermination, human connection could flicker briefly, and that survival sometimes came tangled with complicity, love, and grief that no courtroom could ever fully untangle.