Nazi "Love" for a Jewish Woman | True Story of Auschwitz

Wunsch then said to her, “Children, that’s something different. Children can’t live here.” He immediately ran into the crematorium to find Helena’s sister Róžika.
While Wunsch was able to save Róžika by claiming that she worked for him in the “Canada camp,” he could do nothing for her children. They were murdered in the gas chamber.

Helena and Franz continued their romance in secret, and once Helena was questioned and tortured about their relationship. However, she refused to confirm its existence, knowing that if it were discovered, both of them would be executed. She later said: “There were moments when I forgot that I was Jewish and he was not, and to be honest, in the end, I loved him. But it could never be real.”

The exact nature of their relationship, which lasted until the final evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945, has never been clarified. According to some witnesses, it was not sexual.
According to Bat-Sheva Dagan, a Holocaust survivor, the couple never had sex. As Dagan later recalled, the prisoners slept in bunk beds stacked on top of each other and in rows of three—it would have been impossible. It would have been equally impossible for Citronová to visit the officers’ quarters unnoticed.

After the war, a fellow prisoner said about Wunsch: “He never did anything bad to us, but he was cruel to men. Before he met Helena, he also beat and kicked women, but after that, it was enough for him to beat only men. He beat them often and with a stick he always carried. Helena had a good influence on him and tried to make him behave less cruelly.”

However, Holocaust survivors later testified that during the Jewish uprising in Auschwitz on October 7, 1944, Wunsch mercilessly shot a 20-year-old Greek Jew.

The relationship ended in January 1945, as the Red Army approached Auschwitz. During their final conversation, Franz said to her: “Take care of yourself, Helena, you will make it. I loved you so much.” Then they kissed long and deeply.

On January 27, 1945, the Red Army entered Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz, liberating 7,000 prisoners, most of whom were sick and dying. One of the prisoners liberated by the Red Army was Helena Citronová.

For the next 27 years, she and Franz Wunsch never saw each other again.
After the war, Helena married a Zionist activist, and together they moved to Israel and had two children. Wunsch searched for Helena for years, but she ignored the letters he wrote to her.
He then settled in Austria, married, and started a family of his own.

In 1972, Franz Wunsch, then 50 years old, was put on trial for war crimes, and Helena—by then a married woman and mother of two—came to testify for him after his wife had written her a desperate letter. Despite threats from Jewish activists, she traveled to Vienna because she felt it was her duty to testify about the good things he had done in Auschwitz. However, she also testified that she had witnessed him commit crimes against other prisoners.

In court, Helena spoke slowly, without emotion, and did not look at Wunsch even once. But when it came to the children of her sister Róžika, she could not continue speaking; the words caught in her throat. At that moment, Wunsch began to cry and showed deep remorse. He said that he had never killed anyone and regretted beating the prisoners.

Despite what the judge called “overwhelming evidence” of participation in mass murder, Wunsch was acquitted of all charges. He and Helena never saw each other again.
Helena Citronová was 84 years old when she died on June 4, 2007, in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Franz Wunsch died a natural death on June 23, 2009. He was 86 years old.

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