In 1972, Helena Citrónová walked into a Vienna courtroom and saw a man she had spent nearly three decades trying to forget.
Franz Wunsch was no longer wearing an SS uniform. He no longer carried a weapon or controlled the gates of Auschwitz. Now he sat before a court, accused of participating in murder at the Nazi death camp.
He looked toward Helena.
She refused to meet his eyes.
Twenty-seven years earlier, Wunsch had possessed the power to decide whether she worked, starved, suffered—or disappeared. He had used that power to protect her. He had also used it to brutalize other prisoners.
Now Helena had been asked to testify for him.
The request had not come from Wunsch himself. It had come from his wife, who wrote to Helena and begged her to help the man who had once helped her.
To understand why Helena entered that courtroom, you have to return to 1942, to a railway transport carrying almost 1,000 young Jewish women from Slovakia.
Helena was among them.
She was 19 years old, the daughter of a cantor, and had grown up loving music. Before the war, singing had represented possibility. She imagined performing, building a life and becoming someone known for her voice.
At Auschwitz, her name was replaced by a number.
The women were stripped of their belongings, their hair and their privacy. Hunger became constant. Violence became ordinary. Every morning began with the possibility that someone standing beside them would not survive the day.
Helena was initially assigned to dangerous physical labor. Prisoners were made to demolish unstable buildings, sometimes working close to collapsing walls.
Later, she was transferred to a section of the camp known as “Kanada.”
The name sounded almost hopeful. The reality was grotesque.
Kanada was where prisoners sorted the possessions taken from people arriving at Auschwitz: suitcases, coats, shoes, children’s clothing, family photographs and food packed for journeys whose passengers did not yet understand their destination.
Many of the owners were already dead by the time Helena touched their belongings.
The work could offer small advantages. A prisoner might secretly find a piece of bread, a warmer garment or something that could be traded. But every object carried evidence of a stolen life.
One day in October 1942, a group of female prisoners was ordered to provide entertainment for an SS birthday celebration.
Helena was told to sing.
Refusing was not an option.
She stood before the men who controlled the camp and performed the only German song she knew. Its refrain carried an almost unbearable irony: “Love it was not.”
Among those listening was Franz Wunsch, a 20-year-old Austrian SS man who supervised work connected with Kanada.
He became captivated by her.
For Helena, there was nothing romantic about the moment. She did not see a young admirer. She saw a uniform representing the system that had imprisoned her, separated families and turned murder into routine.
But Wunsch began searching for reasons to approach her.
He sent messages. He arranged small gifts. He tried to protect her from punishments and dangerous assignments. According to Helena’s later recollections, he once asked her to sing again and used a word she almost never heard from an SS man speaking to a Jewish prisoner.
“Please.”
It was the smallest courtesy imaginable.
Inside Auschwitz, it shocked her.
Helena later recalled that, for a moment, she heard the voice of a human being where she had expected only the voice of a monster. That did not make her trust him. It made the situation more confusing.
Wunsch’s interest placed Helena in a position that was both privileged and terrifying.
His attention could keep her alive. It could also get her killed.
Any relationship between an SS man and a Jewish prisoner violated Nazi racial laws. If discovered, Wunsch could face severe punishment. Helena, who possessed no legal protection at all, faced an even more immediate danger.
Other prisoners noticed what was happening.
Some understood that his protection might benefit more than Helena. Others looked at her with suspicion, resentment or anger. In a camp where everyone was starving, even a small piece of food could create a distance between the person who received it and the people who did not.
Helena never pretended that Wunsch was secretly innocent.
The man who spoke gently to her could behave brutally toward others.
Historical research on Wunsch records that he took part in selections, accompanied victims toward the gas chambers and was remembered by survivors for acts of violence. One witness also accused him of killing a prisoner during the Sonderkommando uprising in 1944.
Helena saw the contradiction herself.
According to accounts presented in the documentary Love It Was Not, Wunsch once injured his hand while beating male prisoners. When he expected Helena to help bandage it, she refused.
Whatever existed between them had limits.
He might protect her, but she would not call his violence mercy.
When Helena became ill with typhus, Wunsch reportedly helped conceal and care for her, preventing her condition from making her an easy target for death. He also brought food and used his authority to shield some of the women around her.
Little by little, Helena’s feelings changed.
That change should not be measured by the rules of an ordinary relationship. Helena was a prisoner. Wunsch belonged to the organization imprisoning her. He controlled resources she needed to stay alive.
At first, she said, she hated him.
Later, she admitted that she developed feelings for him.
But even decades afterward, she did not offer a simple definition of what those feelings meant. The exact nature of their relationship remained unclear, and the title of the later documentary about them—Love It Was Not—preserved that ambiguity.
Then, in 1944, the relationship was tested in a way neither of them could have imagined.
A new transport arrived at Auschwitz.
Among the prisoners was Helena’s older sister, Róza.
Róza was not alone. She had come with her husband and two small children.
Helena learned that they had been selected for death.
There was almost no time.
She managed to get a message to Wunsch, begging him to intervene. Accounts say he approached Helena under the appearance of disciplining her so that he could obtain the names and details without exposing their connection.
Then he went looking for Róza.
By the time he found her, she had already been forced into the area where victims were made to undress before entering the gas chamber.
Wunsch used his authority to remove her, claiming that she was needed as a worker in Kanada.
He saved Róza.
He could not—or did not—save her husband and children.
They were murdered.
Róza survived because her sister had the attention of an SS man.
But survival did not erase what happened.
For years afterward, the rescue stood between the two sisters. Róza struggled with the belief that perhaps Helena could have pushed harder, pleaded longer or somehow convinced Wunsch to save the children too.
Helena carried a different torment.
She had achieved the impossible by saving her sister, yet the result still felt like failure. She could not explain why one life had been pulled back while the others were allowed to vanish.
There was no answer that could restore Róza’s children.
There was only the unbearable mathematics of Auschwitz: one person rescued, three people murdered, and two sisters left alive to carry the consequences.
As Nazi Germany began collapsing, Wunsch and Helena understood that their strange connection was approaching its end.
He reportedly gave her warm clothing for the final stage of the camp’s evacuation and sent a farewell message expressing his love.
By the time the war ended, Helena and Róza had survived.
Most of the world they had known had not.
The sisters eventually emigrated to what was then Mandatory Palestine and rebuilt their lives. Helena married, became a mother and took the name Zippora Tahori.
Wunsch tried to locate her through the International Red Cross tracing service.
Helena refused contact.
The man who had protected her inside Auschwitz had also become a living doorway back into it. Answering him would mean reopening memories she was struggling to contain.
So his letters went unanswered.
Years passed.
Wunsch married and lived in Austria. Helena raised a family in Israel. Outwardly, their lives moved in separate directions.
Then Wunsch was arrested in August 1971.
He and another former SS member were charged in what became known as the second Vienna Auschwitz trial. Prosecutors accused them of involvement in murders committed at the camp. Proceedings began in April 1972.
That was when the letter arrived from Wunsch’s wife.
She asked Helena to come to Vienna and testify.
The request forced Helena into a decision for which there was no morally clean answer.
If she refused, she would be withholding the truth that Wunsch had saved her and Róza.
If she agreed, people might believe she was defending an SS perpetrator and minimizing what had happened to his victims.
Some accused her of betrayal. She reportedly received threats and was called a collaborator.
But Helena went.
And that was the real reversal in their story.
For years, people had described Helena as the woman Wunsch saved. In the courtroom, everyone expected to discover whether she would now save him.
But Helena did not arrive to repay a romantic debt.
She arrived to tell the whole truth.
She testified that Wunsch had protected her.
She described the help he gave her and the intervention that saved Róza from the gas chamber.
Then she told the court about his other side.
She spoke about the cruelty she had witnessed, including his violence toward male prisoners. Other survivors also testified about the SS man who behaved gently toward Helena while remaining capable of brutality toward those he had not chosen to love.
Wunsch looked toward her in the courtroom.
Helena kept her eyes away.
That silence contained everything he could no longer control.
At Auschwitz, he had possessed the uniform, the keys and the authority. Helena had survived partly by reading his moods and accepting the protection he offered.
In Vienna, the balance had changed.
He sat waiting while she decided how history would hear his name.
She did not call him a hero.
She did not deny that he had saved her.
And she did not allow one act of rescue to erase his participation in a system of mass murder.
Wunsch was acquitted on June 27, 1972, and released. The outcome did not amount to a declaration that he had behaved honorably at Auschwitz. Accounts of the trial emphasize the legal difficulties surrounding the charges and the failure of the proceedings to produce a conviction. One later assessment of the documentary concluded that Helena’s appearance did not determine the verdict.
Helena returned to Israel.
She and Wunsch did not build a life together. There was no reunion waiting beyond the courtroom, no ending in which affection washed away responsibility.
He remained the SS man who had helped send people toward death.
He also remained the man who had pulled Róza back from it.
Helena lived with both truths.
That is why her story should never be reduced to a tale about love conquering evil. Love did not conquer Auschwitz. It did not save Róza’s husband or her children. It did not absolve Wunsch, and it did not free Helena from the memories she carried after liberation.
What saved Helena was a mixture of courage, chance, talent, endurance and the selective protection of a man who served a murderous system.
She owed him her survival.
She did not owe him her silence.
Helena Citrónová’s greatest act was not making an SS guard love her. It was standing in court decades later and refusing to turn a complicated truth into a comforting lie.
