‘Love it was not’ - so what then was it?
HELENA CITRON was the love of Franz Wunsch’s life. He was an SS sergeant, a brutal guard in AuschwitzBirkenau. She was a Slovakian Jew, deported east in March 1942 and sent to work sorting through suitcases in the subdivision of Auschwitz named Kanada. She sang for him in German on his birthday. For Franz, it was love at first sight.
It was a love that would save Helena’s life — and in the winter of 1944 that of her sister, Roza. Kanada was located by gas chambers IV and V and, at Helena’s request, Franz intervened to save Roza from her death. Roza’s two children, however, were not spared.
Briefly featured in the BBC’s 2005 series Auschwitz: The Nazis and The Final Solution, Franz and Helena’s unbelievable yet true love story has now been fully realised by the Israeli filmmaker Maya Sarfaty in her sensitive and considered documentary, Love It
Was Not.
“I first discovered t he story when I was around
10 years old from Helena’s niece (who) was my acting and ballet teacher,” Ms Sarfaty told the on Tuesday, the day of Love It Was Not’s premiere in Vienna.
Earlier this year, her work won Best Israeli Film at Docaviv, Tel Aviv’s International Documentary Film Festival.
Obsessed by the story, once she discovered Helena and Roza’s video testimonies in the archives of Yad Vashem and established contact with Franz’s daughter, the documentary came together. Particularly effective are the interviews Ms Sarfaty recorded with survivors who remembered the sisters from Kanada.
Helena’s story was unknown in Israel for decades. She and her sister settled there in 1945, started new families and kept silent about their experiences. “If you were a survivor, you had to explain how it was that you survived and not the others and what you did in order to surv ive, which if you are a woman was a loaded question,” Ms Sarfaty said.
But by 1972, Helena’s wartime exper iences made for headline news when Franz was put on trial in Vienna for war crimes. Helena would testify on his behalf. In spite of all the evidence pointing to his direct involvement in the deaths of Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Franz was acquitted of all charges.
The trial and Helena’s involvement brief ly captured the Israeli public imagination thanks in part
to a joint appearance by Helena and Roza on national television (featured in Love It Was Not). “Back then, there was only one channel in Israel. Everybody watched it,” Ms Sarfaty explained, and Roza’s direct confrontation with Helena “blaming her for saving her life while her children were left to go to the gas chambers” made for dramatic television.
Franz nursed his love for Helena for the rest of his life. After the war, he tried to find Helena through the Red Cross and wrote long, effusive and ultimately unanswered love letters expressing his desire to bring Helena and her sister to Austria. He would cut the heads out of old photographs, sticking them on new ones to create the fantasy life he envisaged for himself and Helena. Franz died in February 2009.
Yet the real question at the centre of the film is this: Did she love him? And indeed, could she love him?
“I don’t think I can speak in terms of love in this kind of asymmetrical relationship,” Ms Sarfaty ref lected. Helena, who died in June 2007, was powerless. Her obligation was to survive. However, “I do think she had, as the years went by, positive and warm feelings for him — gratitude for saving her life, for saving her sister, for saving others around her.”
If you were a survivor you had to explain how it was you survived’