Coincidentally, Helena's first (and potentially last) day at work in “Canada” coincided with the birthday of one of the SS men who supervised work in the sorting barrackâFranz Wunsch.
During the lunch break, she [the Kapo] asked who can sing or recite nicely, because today is the SS man's birthday. One girlâOlgaâwas from Greece, and she said she knew how to dance, and so she could dance on the big tables where we folded clothes. And I had a very beautiful voice. So the Kapo said, “Is it true you can sing in German?” and I said, “No,” as I didn't want to sing there. But they forced me to sing. So I sang for Wunsch with my head downâI couldn't look at his uniform. I wept as I sang, and all of a sudden, when I finished the song, I heard him say, “Bitte.” Quietly he asked me to sing it again.... And the girls said,
“Sing, singâmaybe he'll let you stay here.” So I sang the song againâa song in German that I had learned [at school]. So that's how he noticed me, and from that moment I think he also fell in love with meâthat's what saved me, the singing.
Wunsch asked the Kapo to ensure that the girl who had sung so memorably for him returned to work in “Canada” the following day, and by making this request he saved her life. Helena was spared from the Penal Commando and became a fixture in “Canada.” But, while Wunsch looked kindly on her from that first meeting, initially Helena “hated” him. She knew he could be violentâshe heard rumors from other inmates of how he had killed a prisoner for dealing in contraband.
Over the next days and weeks, however, Helena watched as he continued to treat her with kindness. When he went on leave he sent her boxes of “cookies,” which were delivered to her through the intermediary of a “pipel”âthe boys who were the servants of the Kapos (and often served them homosexually as well). Upon his return, Wunsch took to doing something even more daringâsending Helena notes.
When he came into the barracks where I worked he passed by me and threw me a note and I had to destroy it right away, but I saw the words “LoveâI fell in love with you.” I was miserable. I thought I'd rather be dead than be with an SS man.
Wunsch had his own office within “Canada,” and he tried to think of excuses to get Helena to come and see him. Once he asked her to manicure his nails.
We were alone, and he said, “Do my nails so that I can look at you for one minute.” And I said, “Absolutely notâI heard that you killed someone, a young man, by the fence.” He always said that it was not true.... And I said, “Don't bring me into this room ... no manicure, nothing. I don't do manicures.” And I turned around and said, “Now I'm leaving, I can't look at you any more.” So he screamed at meâall of a sudden he became SS: “If you go through that door you will not
live!” And he took out his pistol and threatened me. He loved me, but his honor, his pride was hurt. “What do you mean you're leaving without my permission?” So I said, “Shoot me! Shoot! I prefer death to playing this double game.” So of course he didn't shoot me, and I walked out.
Over time, however, Helena came to realize thatâincredible as it had at first seemed to herâshe could depend on Wunsch. Knowing Wunsch's feelings for her gave her a “sense of security.” Says Helena, “I thought, âThis person won't allow anything to happen to me.'” This emotion was compounded when one day Helena learned from a fellow Slovakian that her sister, RóžÃnka, and her two young children had been seen in the campâand that they were being taken to the crematorium. Helena heard this devastating news when she was in her barracks at Birkenau after work. Despite the curfew, she left the barracks and ran to the nearby crematorium. Wunsch learned about Helena's actions and he caught up with her as she neared the crematorium. He first shouted to the other SS men that she was “an excellent worker in his warehouse.” Then he threw her down on the ground and started beating her for breaking the curfew, so that any SS members watching would not be aware of the relationship between them. Wunsch had already been told that Helena had run to the crematorium because her sister had been taken there and so he asked her: “Quickly, tell me your sister's name before it's too late.” Helena told him, “RóžÃnka,” and also said that she had arrived with her two small children. “Children can't live here!” said Wunsch as he ran down into the crematorium.
He managed to find RóžÃnka inside the crematorium and dragged her out, saying she was another of his workers. But her children died in the gas chamber. Wunsch subsequently managed to arrange for RóžÃnka to work alongside Helena in “Canada.”
My sister couldn't understand where she was. She was told she would work and the children had gone to a kindergartenâthe same stories they sold all of us. She asked me, “Where are the children?” And I said, “On the other side of these buildings there's a children's home.” And so she said, “Can I visit?” And I said, “There are days you can.”
The other women working in “Canada” saw how upset Helena was by the constant questioning from her sister about the fate of her children. So one day they told RóžÃnka, “Stop pestering! The children are gone. You see the fire? That's where they burn children!” RóžÃnka went into shock. She became apathetic and “didn't want to live.” Only Helena's constant care and attention secured her sister's survival over the next months.
Emotionally distraught as RóžÃnka was by the terrible realization that her children had been taken from her and murdered, she was still fortunateâshe remained alive herself. And, protected by her sister, she did survive the war. The other women in “Canada” looked on them both with mixed feelings.
My sister was alive and their sisters were not. The fact was my sister came and he [Wunsch] saved her life. Why didn't such a miracle happen to them, who had lost their entire worldâbrothers, parents, sisters? Even those who were happy for me were not so happy for me. I couldn't share my emotions with my friends. I was afraid of them. And they were all enviousâthey envied me. One of themâa very beautiful womanâsaid to me, “If Wunsch had seen me before you, then he would have fallen in love with me.”
Primarily as a result of Wunsch saving her sister's life, Helena's feelings for him changed radically, “Eventually, as time went by, I really did love him. He sacrificed his life [for me] more than once.” But this relationship was never consummated, unlike some others between the sexes in Auschwitz.
The Jewish [male] prisoners fell in love with all kinds of women as they worked. They disappeared once in a while into the barracks where the clothes were folded and they had sex there. They would have a guard so that if an SS [man] came they could be warned. I couldn't, because he [Wunsch] was SS.
Their relationship was conducted by glances, hurried words and scribbled notes.
He would turn right and left, and when he saw no one was listening he'd
say, “I love you.” It made me feel good in that hell. It encouraged me. They were just words that showed a crazy kind of love that could never be realized. There are no plans that could be realized there. It wasn't realistic. But there were moments when I forgot that I was a Jew and that he was not a Jew. Reallyâand I loved him. But it could not be realistic. Things happened there, love and deathâmostly death.
But, inevitably, because over time “all Auschwitz” knew about their feelings for each other, someone informed on them. Whether it was a prisoner or an SS man no one knows. But, as Helena puts it, “someone ratted.”
One day, as she was being marched back to the camp after work, a Kapo called Helena out of the line. She was taken to the punishment bunker in Block 11. “Every day they took me out and threatened me that if I didn't tell them what had gone on with this SS soldier then at that very moment they would kill me. I stood there and insisted that nothing had been going on.” Wunsch had been arrested at the same time and, like Helena, under questioning he denied that any relationship existed. So eventually, after five days of interrogation, both of them were released. Helena was further “punished” by being made to work on her own in a section of the “Canada” barracks, away from the other women, and Wunsch was careful to be more circumspect in his dealings with her. Nonetheless, as is shown in Chapter 6, Wunsch went on protecting Helena and her sister until Auschwitz was no more.
The story of the relationship between Helena and Wunsch is a profoundly important one. For tales of the rawness of emotion at the brutal end of the human spectrumâmurder, rape, theft, and betrayalâare commonplace in Auschwitz. How much rarer is a story of love. And the fact that love could blossom in such circumstances, between a Jewish woman and an SS guard who was known for his brutality, is nothing short of astounding. Like so much that happened in Auschwitz, were the facts to be imagined in a work of fiction they would be dismissed as unbelievable.
It is also worth noting, however, that circumstances played a decisive role in permitting the relationship to flourish. It is virtually impossible to believe that Wunsch would have fallen in love with Helena had she still been working in the demolition commando. There would have been neither the opportunity
for them to come into close contact, nor the chance of Wunsch protecting her once they did. And, not least, she would never have had the chance of captivating him by singing a song in German for his birthday. In “Canada,” however, not only was there contact between the SS men and Jewish women, there was also the chance that long-term relationships could develop. It is not surprising that proportionately more women survived Auschwitz as a result of working in “Canada” than almost anywhere else.
The relationship between Wunsch and Helena is also, of course, symptomatic of how far the reality of Auschwitz had strayed from Himmler's aspirations for the camp. He would have seen Wunsch's actions as part of a wider pattern of “corruption” at Auschwitz, and in the autumn of 1943, with the arrival of SS Obersturmführer (1st lieutenant) Konrad Morgen, an attempt was made to put the overall situation, as far as the SS leadership was concerned, “right.” Morgen's visit was to have dramatic consequences, for he was no ordinary SS officer but a judge of the SS reserve and an examining magistrate of the State Criminal Police Office. He had been sent to Auschwitz as part of a concerted effort by higher SS authorities to investigate corruption in the campsâin direct contradiction, of course, of Himmler's pious statement at Posen that “we have taken nothing from them [
i.e.,
the Jews] ourselves.”
Oskar Groening and his comrades were well aware of the reasons for Morgen's arrival: “I guess that the ever-increasing corruption became so obvious that they said, âWe have to stem thatâstem the tide of corruption.'” But the actual timing of Morgen's raid on the non-commissioned officers' barracks at Birkenau came as a complete surprise. Groening returned from a trip to Berlin to find “two of my comrades in jail. In one locker they had found fountain pens and a tin of sardines, and in the other guy's locker I don't know what they found, but he later hanged himself. And my locker was sealed.”
Morgen and his colleagues had not yet opened Groening's locker because they insisted on carrying out their investigation with the owner present. As Groening saw it, this was his great good fortune. The front door of the locker was sealed so that it would be obvious if the locker was openedâbut Morgen had not reckoned with the ingenuity of Groening and his comrades.
We moved the locker forward and took the back wall outâthat's pretty easy with plywoodâand we removed suspicious soap and toothpaste that didn't belong there and put the wall back and fixed it with nails. Then I went to the Gestapo and said, ”Excuse me, what sort of nonsense are you doing? I can't get to my locker.” “OK,” they said, “we've just got to check first.” Then they came, took the three seals off, opened the locker, found nothing, patted me on the shoulder and said, “It's OKâcarry on.”
Groening may have escaped sanction himself, but Morgen found plenty of evidence from others that pointed to only one conclusionâcorruption at Auschwitz was widespread. “The conduct of the SS staff was beyond any of the standards that you'd expect from soldiers,” Morgen later testified.
They made the impression of demoralized and brutal parasites. An examination of the lockers yielded a fortune of gold, pearls, rings, and money in all kinds of currencies. One or two lockers even contained genitals of freshly slaughtered bulls, which were supposed to enhance sexual potency. I'd never seen anything like that.
18
And, perhaps even more worryingly for those at SS headquarters, he uncovered evidence not only of financial corruption but also of sexual wrongdoing. Most shocking of all was that one of those implicated was the commandant himself, Rudolf Höss. Morgen was nothing if not a tenacious investigator, and he pursued the allegations against Höss for more than a year. He eventually interviewed his key witness, a former Auschwitz prisoner called Eleonore Hodys, in a prison hospital in Munich in October 1944.
Hodys had been an Austrian political prisoner at Auschwitz, arriving in one of the first women's transports in March 1942. Classified as “Reichsdeutsche” (citizen of the German Reich) she was immediately placed in a privileged position in the camp and was selected to work as a servant in Höss's own house. In May 1942, with his wife away, Höss made a pass at Hodys and tried to kiss her. Frightened, she ran off and hid in the lavatory. According to her testimony she was then summoned to the house some
weeks laterâwhen Höss was in hospital recovering from a riding accidentâand dismissed by Frau Höss. It is reasonable to assume that Höss's wife was suspicious of the developing relationship between Hodys and her husband. Subsequently Hodys was imprisonedânot in Block 11, but in the special jail in the basement of the main administration building, which was chiefly reserved for SS soldiers guilty of serious transgressions. This was a strange place for an Auschwitz prisoner to be held. But Hodys was no ordinary Auschwitz prisoner, and she had been transferred to the SS jail for a reason.