Auschwitz-Geschichten 3: All Caught Up in Barbed Wire Love

Helena Citrónová 💘 Franz Wunsch

 

 

I. 

 

In the early spring of 1942, 19-year-old Helena Citrónová was one of a thousand women and girls from Slovakia deported by rail to Auschwitz.  

 

One day, she was chosen to sing at the birthday party for a young good-looking (but low-ranking) SS officer from Austria called Franz Wunsch, who was working as a guard at the camp. He was immeditely smitten with Helena and had her transferred to work in the section he oversaw; the storage facilities known as Kanada [1]. 

 

Over time, Franz and Helena grew increasingly fond of one another - depite the fact that she was Jewish and he was a Nazi and thus, one would have imagined, committed to upholding the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. 

 

Initially, the idea of loving an SS officer was inconceivable to Helena. But, gradually, romantic feelings grew as they exchanged glances, spoke a few words, and furtively slipped billets-doux to each other. The fact that Franz managed to save Helena's older sister (Rožinka) from the gas chamber, also helped him to win her heart.     

After the War, Franz spent several years searching for Helena, but to no avail [2]. However, they were reunited in 1972 when he was arrested and put on trial for war crimes. Helena came forward to speak on his behalf and Franz was cleared of all charges against him (despite evidence of his brutality and role in sending innocent people to their deaths) [3].

 

II. 

 

So, what does this tale - recently made into a film by Maya Sarfaty [4] - tell us: that love conquers all ...? Not quite. 

 

For we would do well to remember that above the gates of Auschwitz was a sign reading Geschaffen von ewigen Liebe [5] and that the Nazis committed their atrocities out of love for their Fatherland, their Führer, and their Volk. 

 

What it tells us, rather, is why the Thousand Year Reich and all similar idealistic fantasies of stability, purity, and perfect order are doomed to fail. For all it takes is a serpent's whisper or a smile on the face of a pretty Jewish girl and chaos ensues.  

 

We owe our freedom - and, indeed, what is best in us - not to love, but to the fact that we can resist everything except temptation and possess an inherent will to disobedience; sin is the paradoxical secret of salvation.           

Notes 

 

[1] The Effektenlager - usually referred to as Kanada - were the warehouses where the belongings of prisoners who had been sent to the gas chamber on arrival were sorted and stored. Prisoners who worked there were known as the Aufräumungskommando. It was viewed as one of the best jobs in Auschwitz, because prisoners could procure goods for themselves and other inmates.

 

[2] After her liberation from Auschwitz, Helena returned with her sister to Slovakia, before eventually emigrating to Israel. Wunsch had been dispatched to the front when the camp was evacuated in 1945.

 

[3] Wunsch may have fallen in love Helena, but he was still an SS officer who sometimes served on the Judenrampe selecting new arrivals at Auschwitz into those who would live and those to be sent directly to their deaths. At his war crimes trial in Vienna in 1972, witnesses spoke about his often violent behavior.

 

[4] See Love It Was Not (2020), a documentary dir. by Maya Sarfaty: click here to view the official trailer. And click here for a panel discussion of the film, ft. Sarfaty, and co-presented by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and the Israel Office of Cultural Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel in New York. 

 

[5] This phrase - created by eternal Love - is actually part of an inscription on a sign hanging not above Auschwitz, but above the gates of Hell, according to Dante. See Inferno, III, 5-6. 

      Note that Nietzsche famously describes this as a naive error on Dante's part, however, and says that it would have been more telling if he'd placed a sign above the Christian Paradise reading: 'Eternal hate created me as well'. See On the Genealogy of Morality, I. 15.  

 

 

Musical bonus: the song that Helena sang on Franz's birthday was a popular German Lied with music by Fred Markush and lyrics by Fritz Rotter, called Liebe war es nie (released 1932): click here to listen to a version performed by the Lewis Ruth Band. The title of the song, borrowed for Sarfaty's film, is more usually translated in English as 'It was never love'.    

To read other tales from Auschwitz, click here and here.