Well, this is a question that’s plagued historians ever since the end of the Second World War that betrayed the family of Anne Frank to the Nazis.

A diary published after her death is probably the most famous firstirhand account of Jewish life during the war, who was named in an anonymous note uh in which a man called Vandenberg was identified as the betrayer.

She stood in front of judges and said something nobody expected. The prosecutors wanted her to condemn him.

The survivors wanted her to call him a monster. But Helena Citroenova had come all the way from Israel to Vienna to tell the truth about France Vunch, the SS guard who had controlled her fate in Avitz.

And that truth was far more complicated than anyone in that courtroom wanted to hear.

How does a Jewish prisoner end up defending the Nazi who guarded the gas chambers where her people were murdered?

What could possibly make a Holocaust survivor testify on behalf of an SS officer accused of unspeakable crimes?

And what happened between them in that death camp that would haunt Helena for the rest of her life?

The answer reveals something about the Holocaust that most people never learn. Under a new legal theory that death camp workers can be held accountable for the Holocaust.

Something that happened in the shadows of the crematoria that contradicts every simple narrative we’ve been told.

It’s a story about survival, about power, and about the impossible choices people made when every single day was a negotiation between life and death.

What Helena said that day in Vienna would shock the world and force us to confront the moral complexity of one of history’s darkest chapters.

But to understand why she was even there, we need to go back to March 1942, Helena’s arrival and the birthday concert.

Helena Citronova grew up in the town of Humen in eastern Slovakia, the daughter of a caner.

She lived an ordinary life until everything changed. She was just 17 or 18 years old when Slovak authorities told her and nearly a thousand other young Jewish women that they were going to perform national work service for a few months.

It was a lie. The Slovak government had actually sold them to the Nazis for about $500 per prisoner.

On March 26th, 1942, Helena arrived at Avitz on the first official transport of Jewish women to the death camp.

The suggestion that the betrayer appears to be someone from within the Jewish community is hard for many to bear.

She became prisoner number 34,92. Tattooed with an identification mark that would stay with her for the rest of her life.

These 997 young women, most of them unmarried and between 16 and 36 years old, were the first female prisoners in the camp’s history.

They arrived before the women’s barracks were even fully constructed. The reality they encountered was beyond anything Helena could have imagined.

The barracks were liceinfested wooden structures that lacked insulation, sanitation, or proper bedding. The women slept on straw stuffed sacks and lived in constant terror of selections.

The daily events where SS doctors, particularly the infamous Joseph Mangallay, chose who would continue working and who would be sent to the gas chambers based on perceived physical fitness.

Food was a form of torture in itself. Daily rations consisted of a thin slice of bread, watery soup, and a black coffee substitute that barely kept them alive.

Forced labor lasted 10 to 12 hours every day. Helena and the other women dug ditches, carried bricks, and hauled stones, while SS guards routinely beat them for infractions, as minor as not standing straight or moving too slowly.

Diseases swept through the camp like wildfire. Typhus, dissentry, and tuberculosis killed many who survived the initial selections.

With no access to adequate medical care, women perished quickly. The psychological toll was just as devastating.

Helena watched family members disappear, witnessed public executions, and saw friends vanish during daily selections.

In 1942 alone, approximately 200,000 people died at Avitz. The vast majority of them were Jews.

Helena’s first job was demolishing a ruined building at the camp. Guards forced the women to stay at the work site even when parts of the building they were dismantling fell down.

Years later, Helena would describe how they weren’t allowed to run when the wall came down.

So, the first girls were crushed and died on the spot. Here’s where it gets strange.

Helena managed to survive those initial months which already placed her among the minority. Many of the young women who arrived with her on that first transport died within weeks.

At some point she was transferred to what prisoners called the Canada warehouse where they sorted through the belongings of murdered Jews.

It was physically less grueling work but emotionally excruciating. The women handled suitcases, clothes, photographs, and toys belonging to people who had just been exterminated.

On her first day working in the warehouse, Helena was ordered to perform an unusual task.

It was the birthday of France Vunch, one of the SS guards in charge of the gas chambers at Avitz.

Helena was asked to sing for him at his birthday party. If she made a good impression, she was told she might get to stay in the warehouse work detail.

Helena decided to do everything she could to survive. Franvunch was just 20 years old, but he was already a hardened Nazi.

He’d volunteered for the ruthless SS when he was a teenager. At Ashvitz, he was responsible for unimaginable brutality.

His duties included overseeing prisoner labor, supervising the sorting of belongings in the Canada warehouse, and general camp enforcement operations.

Years after the war, he would stand trial charged with shooting and murdering Jewish prisoners, especially members of the Sonda Commando, the Jewish laborers who were forced to herd victims into gas chambers, remove their bodies, burn them in the crematorium, and dump the ashes into rivers.

But on that birthday, something happened that would change both their lives forever. Helena sang birthday songs with tears streaming down her cheeks.

She believed she was about to die and sang with the passion of someone performing for the last time.

She only knew a few German songs including one called love it was not. When she finished did something that shocked her.

He asked her to please sing the song again. That single word stunned Helena. She later recalled hearing the voice of a human being, not the roar of animals.

She heard the word please. She looked up with tears in her eyes, saw a uniform, and thought to herself, where are the eyes of a murderer?

These are the eyes of a human being. But here’s the thing. What seemed like a moment of humanity was actually the beginning of something far more complicated and dangerous.

The dangerous bond. And Vunch’s pursuit. France Vunch was born in Vienna, Austria during the years following the collapse of the Austrohungarian Empire.

His adolescence coincided with the rise of fascism in Austria and the Nazi annexation of the country in March 1938.

Like many young Austrian men of his generation, Vunch became part of the Nazi system early.

He was just a teenager when he entered Nazi service and by the time he was deployed to Avitz, he had been thoroughly indoctrinated.

His rank was SS Unafura, equivalent to a junior non-commissioned officer. While he wasn’t one of the notorious figures like Mangallay or Camp Commandant Rudolfph Hurse, Vunch’s role as a guard placed him squarely within the machinery of genocide.

Every SS man in Achvitz was complicit. According to later trial records, he participated in beatings and forced labor assignments.

He was also implicated in encouraging or forcing prisoners to perform acts of humiliation. After that birthday concert, Vunch began pursuing Helena in ways that put her in grave danger.

He visited her at the Canada warehouse and threw her a letter. Helena destroyed it immediately, but she saw the word love before she did.

The letter said he had fallen in love with her. Her reaction was visceral. She thought to herself that she would rather be dead than be involved with an SS man.

For a long time afterwards, there was just hatred. She couldn’t even look at him.

But Vunch continued, and here’s where the moral lines become impossibly blurred. He began smuggling Helena extra food.

In Avitz, where daily rations were calculated to barely keep a prisoner alive, this was literally the difference between life and death.

The typical daily allowance consisted of watery turnip soup, a piece of bread often covered in sawdust, and sometimes a sliver of margarine or sausage.

Malnutrition and starvation were endemic. Vunch gave Helena extra food, clothing, sheets, and blankets. He turned over his own food rations to her, even giving her gifts of food that his mother sent him.

He also arranged for Helena to keep her position in the Canada warehouse. It was physically less demanding than hauling bricks or digging ditches, though the emotional toll of sorting through the belongings of freshly murdered families was excruciating.

Still, the work came with marginally better survival prospects, and Vunch’s influence played a role in keeping her there.

For Helena, none of this was romantic. She was acutely aware of the nightmarish imbalance that defined their relationship.

WC wore the black SS uniform that represented oppression, cruelty, and extermination. His comrades committed daily atrocities.

And while Vunch wasn’t the most notorious among them, he was still part of this structure.

Helena didn’t have the luxury of interpreting his attention through the lens of choice or consent.

Every day in Avitz was a negotiation for life. The attention from a guard could be either a shield or a curse.

Vunch’s infatuation was dangerous precisely because it defied the impersonal dehumanizing logic of the camp.

Helena was thrust into a visible position against her will, and visibility meant vulnerability. In a place where anonymity was often the only shield from a guard’s wrath or a capo’s cruelty, being singled out, even for favorable treatment was terrifying.

Her fellow prisoners took note. Some felt envy. Others felt suspicion or disdain. But more crucially, it increased the chances that SS officers would view Helena as a liability, someone who had drawn undue attention.

Now, here’s what makes this even more complicated. Survivor testimony suggests that Vunch protected Helena during selections, those periodic purges, where SS doctors would inspect prisoners and determine who was fit to continue working and who would be sent to the gas chambers.

One account describes Vunch forcibly intervening to save Helena from a transport or selection, pulling her out of line under the pretense of needing her for a task elsewhere.

These were moments where his influence saved her life. But each intervention reinforced the fundamental inequality of their relationship.

Helena’s safety was never her own to control. The relationship bore all the hallmarks of coercion, even though Helena later confirmed that Vunch never physically harmed her.

In interviews conducted decades after the war, she admitted that her emotions were complicated. On one level, she understood that Vunch had affections for her and that he was risking something by protecting her.

On another deeper level, she recognized that everything was being done on his terms. There was no question of mutual agency, only survival.

She never claimed to have loved him. Instead, she described the situation as one where she learned to perform gratitude, to navigate the minefield of his attention in order to stay alive.

And there’s another layer to this that makes it even more dangerous. Romantic or personal involvement between SS guards and Jewish prisoners was considered rasen Shandanda.

6 million Jewish people as well as millions of others were murdered during the Holocaust through Nazi persecution or racial defilement, a criminal offense under Nazi racial laws.

SS men caught engaging in such acts risked court marshall or reassignment. Vunch was known by other guards to have taken an interest in Helena and this alone placed both of them at risk.

Though of course it was Helena who would have faced the harsher consequences had suspicion turned to action.

Years later, Helena reflected on the profound toll the attention took on her psyche. Every time she accepted food or protection, she was reminded of those around her who received no such favor.

Guilt and fear coexisted with relief. She recalled a desire to disappear, to avoid the gaze of other guards and prisoners alike.

The idea that someone from the enemy ranks could show her what appeared to be affection wasn’t comforting.

It was unsettling. And as time passed, the initial fear evolved into constant anxiety. What would happen if Vunch’s favor turned to anger?

What if he lost interest? What if his superiors discovered the connection? But then something happened that would test this twisted bond in ways Helena never imagined, saving Rosa and the trial.

In the spring of 1944, 2 years after Helena had been deported to Awitz, her sister Rosa arrived at the camp.

Helena had endured two full years of starvation, illness, slave labor, selections, and the constant looming threat of death.

The idea that her family might still be alive had been her only flicker of hope.

But when Rosa arrived in a later wave of deportations from Slovakia, Helena was thrown into a new state of fear, one more urgent and intimate than anything she had experienced since her own arrival.

The transports that brought Rosa and thousands of others came at a moment when the machinery of extermination was operating at its deadliest.

Between May and July of 1944, more than 437,000 Hungarian and Slovac Jews were deported to Avitz.

Ludge is in eastern Poland. About onethird of the city is Jewish. And this part of the city that is white here and was the ghetto.

Many arrived directly at Burkanau’s ramp and were selected immediately upon disembarkation for either forced labor or extermination.

Over 75% of those deported in that period were sent directly to the gas chambers, often without even being registered.

When Helena heard that her sister was among the newly arrived prisoners, she faced the immediate terror of not knowing whether Rosa would be chosen for work or death.

Then she learned something that turned her blood cold. Rosa’s name appeared on a list scheduled for execution.

Such lists were compiled during selections conducted by SS officers and doctors, most infamously Dr.

Joseph Mangallay, the camp physician who had complete authority to determine which prisoners were fit to work and which would be exterminated.

Mangallay known as the angel of death was particularly interested in twins and individuals with unique physical features whom he exploited for pseudocientific experiments under the guise of medical research.

These experiments often involved forced sterilizations, amputations, injections of chemicals, and other horrific procedures. Yet, paradoxically, being selected for experimentation sometimes meant temporary survival, if only because subjects were kept alive for ongoing procedures.

Upon discovering her sister’s name on the list, Helena turned in desperation to France Vunch.

What happened next is one of the strangest moments in this already impossible story. Vunch responded with an urgent and emotionally fraught proposition.

He begged Helena to convince Rosa to lie during the next selection and claim that she was a twin.

It was a calculated gamble. Mangallay was known to spare twins and unusual subjects from the gas chambers, often redirecting them to his barracks for experiments.

Vunch appeared to understand Mangallay’s sadistic preferences and used that knowledge to devise a survival tactic.

Helena agreed, but convincing Rosa to follow the plan was not simple. Like all new arrivals, Rosa was terrified and disoriented.

The disembarkation process at Burkanau was designed to bewilder and dehumanize. Prisoners were ordered off freight cars, forced to line up under barking SS men and dogs, and subjected to rapid selection by unformed officials.

Many were sent directly to the gas chambers. Those chosen for labor were often unaware of the precise mechanics of what lay ahead.

In this climate of chaos, Helena managed to reach her sister and relay Vunch’s instructions.

She told Rosa to say she was a twin and to show calm confidence when doing so.

Miraculously, the strategy worked. When Rosa was brought before Mangallay, she repeated the lie, claiming she had a twin sister who had also arrived in the camp.

The deception, which might have seemed absurd in any other context, saved her life. Mangala diverted her from the execution list and redirected her to barracks reserved for experimentation subjects or for later processing.

Rosa endured months of suffering, illness, and the omnipresent fear of being discovered or reassigned to the gas chambers, but she survived the war.

Helena would later insist that her sister’s survival was due in no small part to France Vunch’s intervention.

But the question remains, why would this young SS officer do such a thing? Was he moved by genuine feelings for Helena?

Was he attempting to solidify her dependency on him? Or did he, in this one instance, push against the machinery he otherwise served?

Whatever the answer, it’s undeniable that without his actions, Rosa would almost certainly have been exterminated.

Yet, this does not absolve him of guilt. Vunch remained an active participant in a system that exterminated more than 1.1 million people at Avitz.

Awitz Burkenau, the largest Nazi extermination camp. At least 1.1 million people were murdered here.

90% of them Jews, including women like Rosa and Helena, who had no one to intervene on their behalf.

Now, fast forward to 1972. France Vunch was put on trial in Vienna for war crimes committed at Avitz.

The charges were serious. Survivors accused him of participating in beatings, psychological abuse, and direct acts of violence that led to the deaths of prisoners.

One of the most chilling charges alleged that he had encouraged or coerced inmates to commit suicide.

He was also accused of shooting and murdering Jewish prisoners and personally inserting canisters of poison gas into the chambers where Jews were killed.

The defense knew about Helena. They knew that Vunch had shown her extraordinary favor in Avitz.

Though such relationships were always steeped in coercion, the defense used her case to argue that Vunch had the capacity for mercy and even compassion, painting him as a man who had acted with moral ambiguity rather than outright evil.

The court summoned Helena from Israel and she agreed to appear. More than 25 years had passed since she had last seen the man who altered her fate inside a death camp.

Helena’s courtroom appearance stunned the public. She arrived not to denounce Vunch as a monster, but to tell the truth in full complexity.

Under oath, she did not deny the atrocities that Vunch had committed. She acknowledged that he had been part of the system of terror, that he had been present during selections, and that he had the power to kill or save with a glance.

But she also testified that he had shown her kindness, that he had shielded her from death, and that he had intervened to save her sister’s life.

She made it unequivocally clear that she had never loved him, never consented to a romance, and never forgotten that he was an SS officer.

But she believed that telling the full truth, including the parts that made her deeply uncomfortable, was a moral obligation.

Vunch was visibly shaken during Helena’s testimony. According to court observers and news archives, he broke down in tears as she recounted their Avitz encounters.

Some saw this as a rare display of remorse. Others viewed it as a tactical show of emotion.

Whatever the motive, the impact on the court was undeniable. In a controversial verdict, France Vunch was acquitted.

The court cited insufficient direct evidence of murder and torture, and Helena’s testimony of kindness appeared to weigh heavily in the judgment.

Critics argued that her account, though honest, had inadvertently contributed to the whitewashing of a man who had helped enforce the genocidal machinery of Avitz aftermath and legacy.

Helena returned to Israel shortly after the trial and resumed her quiet life, continuing to avoid public discussions of her past.

For decades, she spoke nothing of Ashvitz, nor of France Vunch. Her family knew she had been in the camps, but they didn’t know the details, not about the selections, not about the SS officer who had once risked his position to protect her.

In later years, however, she opened up to historians and filmmakers. She contributed in-depth interviews to the USC Shaw Foundation’s visual history archive, a living educational reservoir of survivor testimonies.

In these recorded sessions, Helena confronted the deeply conflicted emotions she carried. Intense survivors guilt and the perplexing, morally ambiguous nature of her wartime bond with France Vunch.

It wasn’t until 2020 that her story reached a broader audience. Maya Sarafati’s documentary Love It Was Not premiered at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam that year and won a claim at DOC Viv in Israel.

The film revisited Helena’s testimony as well as archival footage and interviews with her sister Rosa France Vunch’s daughter Dagmar and other women from the Canada unit at Burkanau drawing renewed attention to the paradox of their relationship.

The documentary aired on national television in Israel and Austria in 2021, reigniting ethical debates about bonds formed under genocide.

Helena’s narrative was also featured in the BBC’s 2005 series Avitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution: substantially widening public awareness.

In her interviews, Helena spoke with remarkable cander. She never romanticized Vunch or portrayed him as a redeemed hero.

Rather, she insisted that in a world ruled by uniformed brutality, he had, at least toward her, displayed brief and startling glimpses of humanity.

She insisted that her relationship was a survival mechanism, not romance, driven by the coercive dynamics of power in a death camp.

While certain crumbs of grace existed, they could never erase Avitz’s horror or Vunch’s role in it.

Her refusal to categorize their bond as love or hate, reflects a central theme in Holocaust scholarship, particularly the concept of the gray zone, where conventional labels of victim and perpetrator collapse under extreme duress.

Helena’s experience mirrors documented stories of coerced relationships, coup protecting fellow inmates in exchange for favors, women trading intimacy for survival, and other morally ambiguous survival measures.

Helena Citronanova, later known by her Hebrew name Zapora Tahori, died in Tel Aviv on June 4th, 2007 at the age of 84.

She was buried at Yakon Cemetery. Her sister Rosa survived as well. Though tragically, Rosa’s two young children did not live through Avitz.

The sisters immigrated to mandatory Palestine in July 1945. So, what does this story tell us?

Helena’s story spotlights the grotesque power imbalance at Avitz. An SS guard wielded absolute authority over life and death while prisoners fought each day simply to survive.

In this deadly context, could there ever be genuine love? Helena and scholars agree that any emotional connection must be understood as a survival tactic manipulated by both coercion and extreme dependency.

Does Vunch’s occasional mercy redeem him academically and morally? The answer remains no. He was complicit in genocide.

His protective actions toward Helena and Rosa, though extraordinary among his peers, cannot balance the immense system of brutality he served.

Helena made clear she neither loved him nor saw him as innocent. His kindness was real, but so was his role in the machinery of death.

Forced liaison, coerced intimacies, and tactical obedience are documented across Holocaust testimonies. They defy simple moral judgments and demand we understand trauma, memory, guilt, and silence as intertwined.

Helena bore deep survivors guilt, not simply for living, but for the choices survival required.

Publications including Forbes, POV magazine, Jewish Boston, Times of Israel, and the Remember the Women Institute have all noted the documentaries exploration of love, survival, morality, and the danger of analogizing such complex histories to romance.

In educational settings, it shows that Holocaust narratives cannot always be neatly categorized. They must reflect moral ambiguity.

Helena’s show Foundation interviews continue to be used in academic and memorial contexts, underscoring the gray zone of survival and the urgent need to preserve nuanced eyewitness testimony.

Her story has been integrated into curriculara at institutions including USC, Yadvashm, and numerous Holocaust education programs, challenging students to confront moral complexity.

What Helena Citronova lived through forces us to ask uncomfortable questions. It reminds us that history isn’t always simple, that survival sometimes required impossible choices, and that the people who lived through the Holocaust deserve to have their stories told with all the moral complexity they contain.

Helena used every means she could to live and to help her beloved sister and fellow inmates.

It wasn’t easy, and it’s impossible for us to grasp what she went through. The family she built in Israel today is testament to her strength and resilience.

And perhaps that’s the most important truth of all.