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Rusty Vanranch, Hills Park Atlanta, Atlanta, GA (2025)

12/02/2025

In 1931, a fifteen-year-old girl in the Arkansas backwoods told her father she wanted to make a fiddle.
He pointed to his tools and a pile of wood. "There's what you need. Help yourself."
Violet Brumley picked up a knife and started whittling.
Her father, George Washington Brumley, had made his first fiddle in 1888 when he was fourteen years old—back when homesteaders built everything themselves because buying wasn't an option. He'd traded fiddles for wagons, shotguns, milk cows. A fiddle was worth a dollar, maybe, if you sold it for cash.
Violet watched him work, learning which woods sang and which stayed silent. She memorized the curve of the neck, the arch of the top, the precise placement of the sound post. No blueprints. No instruction manual. Just memory and feel.
It took her months to finish that first fiddle. When she drew the bow across the strings, the sound was perfect.
She was hooked.
But life had other plans.
At eighteen, Violet married Adren Hensley. The babies started coming—nine children in all, born while the family scraped by on subsistence farming. They were so poor, Violet later joked, that "if the flies had anything to eat, they'd bring their own food."
Between 1932 and 1934, she made three more fiddles. Then fiddle number four.
Then nothing. For twenty-seven years.
Nine children don't raise themselves. Fields don't plow themselves. There was no time for five-gallon buckets of wood shavings and 250-hour crafting projects when you were trying to keep your family fed.
The fiddles gathered dust. The music stayed quiet.
The family moved to Oregon to pick fruit—strawberries, potatoes, prunes. Migrant work. Survival. In 1959, they heard about cheap land near Yellville, Arkansas—forty acres for $250. They moved back, bought the land, started over.
Violet was in her forties. Her children were growing up. And slowly, quietly, she picked up her knife again.
In 1961, she made fiddle number five.
The break was over. She was a fiddle maker again.
By 1962, at age forty-six, someone convinced her to enter the local Turkey Trot Talent Show in Yellville. She came in second. At the show, she met Jimmy Driftwood, a folk musician who invited her to play at his theater in Mountain View.
That led to the War Eagle Craft Fair.
Which led to Silver Dollar City discovering her in 1967.
The theme park in Branson, Missouri, originally wanted her as a woodcarver. But when they heard her play the fiddles she'd made with her own hands—heard her unique style, her Ozark rhythms, her refusal to play like anyone else—they changed their minds.
They wanted her to fiddle.
And suddenly, after fifty years of obscurity, Violet Hensley became famous.
Not movie-star famous. Folk-legend famous. The kind where Charles Kuralt shows up to interview you for CBS News. Where National Geographic features you in 1970. Where producers from Captain Kangaroo and The Beverly Hillbillies call asking if you'll appear on their shows.
She traveled to promote Silver Dollar City, appearing on The Art Linkletter Show in 1970, walking around eating ice cream with "Granny" when The Beverly Hillbillies filmed episodes at the park. In 1977, she danced with Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo. In 1992, she was on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee.
Through it all, she kept making fiddles. Seventy-four in total, each one taking about 260 hours of work. She used native Ozark woods—buckeye, sassafras, pine, spruce, basswood, cherry, curly maple, bird's eye maple, quilted maple. She'd cut down the trees herself with a handsaw.
"Someone asked me a long time ago what my secret was of putting the tone into a fiddle," she said. "The tone just comes in with the wood as best as I can figure."
Her fiddles became treasures. Collectors paid thousands. Museums displayed them. But Violet kept a few she wouldn't sell for any price.
She also learned to clog at age sixty-nine—doctor's orders, after they told her to stop breaking horses and ba****ck riding. Her signature move became playing the fiddle on top of her head while clogging, her face beaming with pure joy.
For decades, she demonstrated at Silver Dollar City's festivals. She released three albums with her family—daughters Sandra and Lewonna, husband Adren, son Calvin. The old-time tunes her father had taught her, songs that weren't widely circulated, preserved through her hands and voice.
In 2004, the Arkansas Arts Council designated her an Arkansas Living Treasure.
But Violet had one dream left.
She'd grown up listening to the Grand Ole Opry on a battery-powered radio when she was nine years old, just after the show debuted in 1925. For ninety years, she'd listened to that program, playing along in her Arkansas cabin, imagining what it would be like to stand on that stage.
It seemed impossible. She was too old, too unknown, too far from Nashville's spotlight.
Then fiddler Tim Crouch read her autobiography and found mention of her dream. He contacted Opry star Mike Snider.
And on August 6, 2016, at ninety-nine years old, Violet Hensley walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage.
She wore a purple dress hand-sewn by her daughter Sandra. She carried fiddle number four, the one she'd made when she was seventeen years old.
The audience of 4,400 people rose to their feet before she even played a note.
Snider warned them: "This little lady plays her way."
Violet launched into "Angelina Baker," and the band scrambled to keep up with her rapid-fire fiddling. Her unique style—developed in isolation, learned from her father and the old-time fiddlers of the Ozarks—was unlike anything Nashville had heard.
When she finished, the applause was thunderous.
She returned in 2017 for her 100th birthday. Then again in 2018. Three times on the Opry stage, each time leaving audiences with their jaws on the floor.
In 2018, at age 101, she was inducted into the National Fiddler Hall of Fame.
And she kept going.
At 105, she contracted COVID-19. Her symptoms were mild. She recovered.
Today, at 109 years old, Violet Hensley is still alive in Yellville, Arkansas.
Her vision is too poor to make complete fiddles now, but she can still whittle by feel. She still demonstrates her craft. She still plays—fifty-eight years performing at Silver Dollar City and counting.
Her daughters say that while her muscles and words may fail her sometimes, the music never does. "For 109, she probably remembers more than we know, but just can't say it. She feels it."
The girl who made her first fiddle in poverty, who spent decades raising children in obscurity, who didn't become famous until she was in her fifties, who finally achieved her lifelong dream at ninety-nine—she's still here.
A living bridge to an Ozarks that barely exists anymore. A testament to craft, to patience, to the long game. A reminder that dreams don't have expiration dates.
Her story started with a father telling his daughter to help herself to his tools. It continues with a 109-year-old woman whose handmade fiddles are museum pieces, whose music has inspired generations, whose life proves that fame delayed isn't fame denied.
Violet Hensley didn't become a legend by starting early or burning bright and fast.
She became a legend by never stopping. By making seventy-four fiddles one knife stroke at a time. By playing the music she loved for a century, whether anyone was listening or not.
And when the world finally noticed, she was ready. She'd been practicing for ninety years.
Would you have had the patience to spend decades perfecting a craft in obscurity, knowing your moment might never come?

12/01/2025

In January 26, 1972, a 22-year-old flight attendant opened her eyes in a frozen field — the only survivor of a plane that exploded 33,000 feet above Europe.
Vesna Vulović never remembered the blast. One moment she was serving passengers, the next she was waking inside the wreckage, strapped to part of the aircraft’s tail. Her legs were crushed, her spine fractured, her skull cracked — but she lived.

Doctors couldn’t explain it. Investigators called it impossible. Newspapers called her a miracle.

Her quiet strength afterward became legend.

12/01/2025

July 29, 2009. Afghanistan.
Major Mary Jennings Hegar was flying into a firefight to save three American soldiers who were bleeding out under Taliban gunfire.
Her helicopter took massive fire on approach. Bullets shredded the windshield. An RPG tore through the cabin, sending shrapnel into MJ's arm and leg.
Blood soaked through her flight suit.
But her hands never left the controls.
"I can still fly," she told her crew, her voice steady as chaos erupted around them.
They touched down just long enough to grab the wounded. MJ provided covering fire while bullets screamed past. Every second on the ground meant death.
They lifted off with the wounded aboard.
Then the helicopter was hit again—critically. Power systems failed. The aircraft was dying mid-air.
MJ fought the controls, guiding the dying helicopter down, trying to prevent it from slamming into a mountain or flipping completely.
They crashed hard. Everyone survived the impact.
But now they were trapped in enemy territory, surrounded by Taliban fighters who knew exactly where they were.
MJ and her crew formed a defensive perimeter. Wounded, outnumbered, pinned down with injured soldiers who desperately needed medical attention.
They held their ground. Waiting for rescue.
Then they heard it—the sound of OH-58 Kiowa helicopters coming to extract them.
But there was a problem. Kiowas are tiny reconnaissance birds. Two-seaters. There was no room inside for everyone.
The most critically wounded went into the cockpits. The rest would have to ride outside.
MJ—still bleeding from shrapnel wounds, having just survived a crash and firefight—climbed onto the helicopter's skids.
The external platforms became her seat. She strapped in as best she could, rifle in hand, completely exposed to wind and enemy fire.
The Kiowa lifted off.
That's when she saw him: a Taliban fighter about seventy yards away, raising his weapon, aiming directly at the helicopter.
At her.
MJ was hanging from the side of a moving aircraft, wounded and exhausted.
She raised her rifle, braced it against the helicopter, and fired.
The Taliban fighter went down.
She kept her weapon ready, scanning for threats, until they reached safety.
Every single person made it home alive that day.
For her actions, Major Mary Jennings Hegar received the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor—one of the military's highest honors for extraordinary heroism.
But according to official U.S. military policy, MJ wasn't in combat that day.
Because women weren't allowed in combat.
The "combat exclusion policy" officially barred women from ground combat roles and certain positions. Never mind that women like MJ were flying into active firefights, getting shot, returning fire, and earning valor awards.
Officially, they weren't in combat. Just "combat support."
It was bureaucratic fiction designed to maintain a lie that women weren't already doing exactly what MJ had done.
And MJ was done with the lie.
In 2012, she became the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit challenging the combat exclusion policy.
Her argument was simple: "I've already been in combat. I've got the bullet wounds and the medals to prove it."
The Pentagon fought back, claiming women weren't physically capable and that allowing them in combat would damage military readiness.
MJ's entire career was the counterargument.
In January 2013, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced the combat exclusion policy would be lifted.
All military roles—including infantry, armor, and special operations—would be open to women.
Not because bureaucrats decided to be progressive, but because women like MJ had already proven they could do the job.
MJ wrote a memoir called "Shoot Like a Girl"—turning an insult she heard throughout her career into a badge of honor.
She ran for Congress, bringing her military experience into politics, advocating for veterans and service members.
But when people ask about that day in Afghanistan—about hanging from a helicopter, bleeding, shooting at enemy fighters while completely exposed—she doesn't talk about courage.
She talks about her crew.
"I wasn't thinking about medals. I was thinking about my crew."
That's what defines a hero. Not the uniform or the rank, but the refusal to leave anyone behind.
MJ had every reason to give up that day. She was wounded. Her helicopter was destroyed. She was surrounded by enemies.
But giving up would have meant abandoning her crew and the wounded soldiers they'd rescued.
So she didn't.
She kept flying. She kept fighting. She climbed onto the outside of a helicopter and shot back at people trying to kill her.
And then she came home and fought a different battle—to make sure the military acknowledged what women like her had been doing all along.
Her legacy isn't just the lives she saved in Afghanistan.
It's every woman who now has the opportunity to serve in roles that were closed to them, because MJ refused to accept that her service—and her sacrifice—didn't count as combat.
She didn't wait for permission. She didn't ask for recognition. She just did the job.
And when they told her the job didn't exist for women, she proved them wrong—with bullets, blood, and a lawsuit that changed military history.
Major Mary Jennings "MJ" Hegar. Pilot. Warrior. Hero.
The woman who hung from a helicopter skid, bleeding and shooting, because her crew needed her.

12/01/2025

In November 1944, a starving Jewish pianist hid in the ruins of Warsaw. A German officer found him and asked one question: "Can you play?" What happened next saved a life—and proved that humanity can survive even in hell.

November 17, 1944. Warsaw was a graveyard.
The city had been systematically destroyed by the N***s after the Warsaw Uprising. Buildings were burned, blown up, reduced to rubble. The population had been expelled or killed. Only about 20 Jews remained alive in what had once been a thriving community of hundreds of thousands.
One of them was Władysław Szpilman, hiding in an abandoned building at 223 Aleja Niepodległości.
Szpilman had been famous before the war—a celebrated pianist who played live on Polish Radio, performing for audiences across Poland. Then the Germans invaded. His family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, they were deported to Treblinka extermination camp.
Szpilman escaped at the last moment, helped by a Polish policeman who pulled him from the line. His entire family—his parents, his sisters—were murdered in the gas chambers.
For two years, Szpilman survived in hiding on the "A***n" side of Warsaw, helped by about thirty non-Jewish Polish friends who risked their lives to shelter him. Then came the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944. When it failed, the Germans expelled all remaining Poles from the city.
Szpilman was left completely alone in the ruins. No food. No heat. Winter approaching. Slowly starving to death in the frozen skeleton of a destroyed city.
Then, on November 17, he heard footsteps.
German footsteps.
A Wehrmacht officer was inspecting the building, preparing it to become a German command headquarters. Szpilman thought it was over. After everything he'd survived, this was how it would end—discovered by a German soldier in the ruins.
The officer was Captain Wilhelm Hosenfeld, 49 years old, a Catholic from a small village in Hessen, Germany. He'd been a teacher before the war, married with five children. He'd joined the N**i party in 1935, believing in Germany's restoration.
But what Hosenfeld saw in Poland changed him.
He'd kept a diary throughout the war, documenting the atrocities he witnessed. The abuse of Poles. The persecution of priests. The horror of the Warsaw Ghetto. The systematic extermination of Jews. In his diary, he wrote his growing disgust with the N**i regime, his shame at what his country had become.
And he didn't just write. He acted.
He'd already saved several people—Jews and Poles—using his position to provide false papers, jobs, hiding places. One Jewish man, Leon Warm, escaped from a train to Treblinka. Hosenfeld employed him at a sports stadium and gave him false identity papers.
Now, standing in that ruined building, Hosenfeld found Szpilman—emaciated, terrified, clearly Jewish.
"What did you do before the war?" Hosenfeld asked in German.
"I was a pianist," Szpilman whispered.
Hosenfeld looked at him for a long moment. Then he said something unexpected:
"Come with me."
He led Szpilman downstairs to a room where a damaged piano stood. The keys barely worked. The instrument was broken, just like the city around them.
"Play something," Hosenfeld said.
Szpilman's hands were trembling—from fear, from cold, from months of starvation. He sat at the broken piano and began to play.
Chopin's Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp minor.
It was the same piece Szpilman had been playing on Polish Radio on September 23, 1939, when German bombs fell on Warsaw and interrupted the broadcast. The same piece that had marked the beginning of his nightmare.
Now, five years later, he played it again in the ruins, for a German officer who held his life in his hands.
Hosenfeld stood silently, listening. When the music ended, he didn't arrest Szpilman. He didn't report him. Instead, he did something that could have gotten him executed.
He decided to save him.
"Stay here," Hosenfeld said. "I'll bring you food."
Over the next weeks, Hosenfeld visited secretly, bringing bread, jam, and supplies. He helped Szpilman find a better hiding place—a loft above the attic that Szpilman hadn't even noticed. He gave him a German army greatcoat to keep warm in the freezing winter. He brought encouragement and news of the Soviet advance.
Every visit was a risk. Helping a Jew was punishable by death. But Hosenfeld kept coming.
On December 12, 1944, Hosenfeld's unit was ordered to retreat. The Soviets were advancing. Before leaving, Hosenfeld came to say goodbye. He left Szpilman with final supplies and a message of hope.
Szpilman, grateful beyond words, told him: "If you ever need help after the war, find me. I'm the pianist Szpilman of Polish Radio."
But Hosenfeld, ashamed of his uniform and what it represented, never told Szpilman his name.
On January 17, 1945, Soviet forces liberated Warsaw. Szpilman emerged from hiding, alive because of the food Hosenfeld had provided.
That same day, just 30 kilometers away, Soviet troops captured Hosenfeld and his company near Błonie.
The Soviets charged him with espionage and war crimes for simply being a German officer. They sent him to a prisoner-of-war camp. In 1946, desperate, Hosenfeld wrote to his wife listing the names of Jews he'd saved—including Szpilman—hoping they could help secure his release.
The letter reached Leon Warm in 1950. Warm visited Hosenfeld's wife and then wrote to Szpilman, who immediately tried to help.
But Szpilman faced a wall. He appealed to Jakub Berman, head of the Polish secret police. Berman came to Szpilman's home and delivered devastating news:
"If your German were still in Poland, we could get him out. But the Soviets won't release him. They say he belonged to an intelligence unit. We can do nothing."
Meanwhile, in Soviet captivity, Hosenfeld suffered. In 1950, a military tribunal in Minsk sentenced him to 25 years hard labor. The one-page verdict noted he'd offered no defense. He endured years of harsh conditions and likely torture.
On August 13, 1952, Wilhelm Hosenfeld died of a ruptured aorta. He was 57 years old. He never knew if Szpilman had survived. He never received recognition for the lives he'd saved.
Szpilman carried the weight of that failure for the rest of his life.
In 1946, he published his memoir, "Śmierć Miasta" (Death of a City), describing his survival and the German officer who saved him. Stalinist censors changed Hosenfeld's nationality from German to Austrian, trying to downplay German heroism.
But Szpilman never forgot. When he returned to Polish Radio after the war for his first broadcast, he opened with the same Chopin Nocturne he'd played for Hosenfeld in the ruins—a tribute to the man who'd heard his music and chosen mercy.
Decades passed. In the 1990s, Hosenfeld's wartime diaries and letters were discovered by his family. In them, he wrote: "I try to save everyone I can." The diaries documented his horror at N**i atrocities and his efforts to help victims.
Szpilman's son Andrzej began a campaign for Hosenfeld's recognition. In February 2009—57 years after Hosenfeld's death—Yad Vashem finally named Wilhelm Hosenfeld "Righteous Among the Nations."
It was an extraordinary honor. Very few Wehrmacht officers receive this recognition, because the German army was intimately connected with the Holocaust.
But Hosenfeld was one of the rare people who wore the German uniform and chose humanity over orders.
In 2002, Roman Polanski—who survived the Kraków ghetto as a child—directed "The Pianist," based on Szpilman's memoir. Adrien Brody won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The film won the Palme d'Or and three Oscars, bringing Szpilman and Hosenfeld's story to the world.
Władysław Szpilman lived until July 6, 2000. He was 88 years old. He spent over 50 years performing, composing, and teaching music—a lifetime made possible by five minutes of Chopin played in the ruins and one man's decision to choose mercy.
On December 4, 2011, a commemorative plaque was unveiled at 223 Niepodległości Avenue in Warsaw, the building where their paths crossed. Szpilman's son Andrzej attended, along with Hosenfeld's daughter Jorinde.
Two families, former enemies, united by the memory of one extraordinary act of humanity.
This story proves something we desperately need to remember:
Even in the darkest systems, individual choices matter. Even when surrounded by evil, people can choose good. Even when orders demand cruelty, conscience can demand mercy.
Wilhelm Hosenfeld couldn't stop the Holocaust. He couldn't prevent the destruction of Warsaw. He couldn't change N**i policy.
But he could bring bread to one starving man. He could listen to Chopin in the ruins. He could risk his life for someone the system said didn't deserve to live.
And that one choice gave Władysław Szpilman 55 more years of life—years of music, teaching, family, and joy.
Sometimes saving the world starts with saving one person.

12/01/2025

In September 1942, she sang one song at Auschwitz—'Love It Was Not.' An SS officer heard her voice and fell in love. He saved her life and her sister's. The cost of that survival haunted her forever.

Helena Citrónová was born on August 26, 1922, in Humenné, a town in Slovakia. Her father was a cantor in the local synagogue. She grew up loving music, dreaming of performing on stage in Prague someday.
She never made it to Prague.
On March 26, 1942, nineteen-year-old Helena was part of the first mass transport of Jewish women to Auschwitz-Birkenau—997 Slovak Jewish girls and women, tricked by promises of lucrative work abroad.
The Slovak government had sold them. Five hundred Reichsmarks per person. About $200 in 1942 dollars. The price of a young woman's life.
This wasn't ancient history. This was 1942—when Casablanca premiered, when "White Christmas" topped the charts, when people danced to Glenn Miller while trains carried children to death camps.
Helena arrived at a place that would become synonymous with genocide and terror. At first, she was assigned to brutal demolition work. She quickly realized she wouldn't survive long doing that kind of labor.
She managed to get transferred to "Canada"—the warehouse where the belongings of murdered prisoners were sorted and processed. It was called Canada because the prisoners imagined it as a land of plenty, where you might find food or warm clothing hidden in confiscated suitcases.
It was also where death lived. Every item they sorted had belonged to someone who'd just been murdered in the gas chambers.
In September 1942, Franz Wunsch, a 20-year-old Austrian SS-Rottenführer (corporal) in charge of the Canada operation, celebrated his birthday. The guards asked if anyone could sing something nice for the occasion.
Helena, trembling and crying, stepped forward. She sang the only German song she knew, one she'd learned in school: "Liebe war es nie."
"Love It Was Not."
Wunsch was transfixed. He ordered the Kapo to have Helena return to work in Canada the next day. Without meaning to, he'd just saved her life—she'd been scheduled for the penal commando unit, which meant almost certain death.
From that moment, everything changed.
Wunsch began secretly sending Helena presents and love letters. He used his influence to protect her from the worst punishments. He gave her extra food when he could. He arranged safer work details.
Helena hated him at first. She later recalled receiving a note from him that contained the word "love." "I thought I'd rather be dead than be involved with an SS man," she said. "For a long time afterwards there was just hatred. I couldn't even look at him."
But in Auschwitz, survival wasn't about principles. It was about staying alive one more day, one more hour.
Over time, Helena's feelings became complicated. Wunsch's kindness—relative though it was—began to soften her hardened heart. When she contracted typhus, he attended to her needs. He protected her when he could.
Other prisoners noticed. Some called her "his Jewish w***e." She faced jealousy, resentment, even beatings from other women because of her favored status.
The relationship was forbidden on both sides. Under the Nuremberg Laws, any sexual or romantic relationship between an A***n and a Jew was punishable by imprisonment or death. Wunsch's SS comrades knew about the liaison. His superiors interrogated and reprimanded him.
But he continued anyway.
It remains unclear whether their relationship was physical. What's certain is that it was deeply unequal—he held all the power, she had none. Yet something developed between them that went beyond simple transaction.
"As time went by, there came a moment when I truly loved him," Helena later confessed. "He risked his life for me more than once."
In October 1944, Helena's sister Róza arrived at Auschwitz with her husband and two young children. Helena sent a secret letter begging Wunsch to save them.
He approached Helena under the pretext of punishing her for breaking curfew, learned the details, and acted immediately. He managed to pull Róza from the gas chamber—she had already entered—but his authority wasn't enough to save the rest. Her husband and children were murdered.
Róza survived. But she blamed Helena for the death of her children for the rest of her life. That anger never healed.
Helena's parents were also murdered in the gas chambers. Her brother committed su***de during a failed escape attempt.
In January 1945, as the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz, Wunsch contacted Helena for the final time. He sent her warm clothes and socks for the death march, along with a note: "I loved you very much."
Helena was among the prisoners liberated by the Red Army. She and Róza returned to their hometown in Slovakia. Everyone they knew was dead.
In July 1945, the sisters emigrated to Mandatory Palestine, which would become Israel. Helena married an Israel Defense Forces soldier named David Tahori, changed her name to Zippora Tahori, and had two children.
She tried to rebuild a life. But the past wouldn't let go.
After the war, Wunsch spent nearly two years desperately searching for Helena. He used the Red Cross International Tracing Service to locate her in Israel. He wrote letters.
She refused all contact.
Eventually, he stopped writing and got married.
In 1972, twenty-seven years after liberation, Helena received a letter. But it wasn't from Wunsch—it was from his wife.
Wunsch was on trial in Vienna for his role at Auschwitz. He would be the last SS officer who served in a death camp to face trial in Austria. His wife begged Helena to testify on his behalf.
Helena was torn. Her fellow survivors accused her of being a collaborator. She received death threats. But she also knew the truth: Wunsch had saved her life and her sister's life.
She decided to go to Vienna.
In the courtroom, she testified that Wunsch had helped her while at Auschwitz. But she also confirmed that she witnessed him committing crimes against other prisoners. Survivors testified to his brutality—savage beatings of male prisoners, participation in selections at the ramp, lies told to victims being led to gas chambers.
Throughout her testimony, Helena studiously avoided eye contact with Wunsch, much to his disappointment.
The court released him—not because he was innocent, but because the statute of limitations for his crimes had expired.
Helena returned to Israel and lived quietly until June 4, 2007, when she died at age 84. She was buried at Yarkon Cemetery.
Years after her death, filmmaker Maya Sarfaty created the documentary "Love It Was Not," telling Helena and Wunsch's story for the first time to a wide audience. The 2005 BBC documentary "Auschwitz: The N***s and 'The Final Solution'" also covered their relationship.
Wunsch died in Vienna on February 23, 2009.

This is not a simple love story. It's not romantic. It's not clean.
It's the story of a young woman who sang one song to stay alive in a place designed for death. Who accepted protection from a man who participated in genocide. Who survived while millions didn't.
Helena's story forces us to confront impossible questions: What would you do to survive? How do you live with gratitude toward someone who saved you while murdering others? Can love exist in the shadow of such evil—or was it something else entirely?
"I saw him as a human being," Helena once said.
In Auschwitz, where humanity was systematically destroyed, that simple acknowledgment was both a revelation and a tragedy.
Helena carried complex memories for the rest of her life: gratitude and shame, affection and hatred, relief and guilt. She never claimed her story was heroic. She simply told the truth: survival in Auschwitz required impossible compromises.
Fellow survivors disagreed about her legacy. Some understood. Others never forgave her.
But Helena survived. Against all odds, she survived. So did her sister Róza, though at a cost that damaged their relationship forever.
Helena's voice matters because it refuses easy answers. Her story doesn't fit neatly into categories of good and evil, collaboration and resistance, love and survival.
It reminds us that the Holocaust wasn't just about numbers and statistics. It was about individual human beings facing impossible choices in unthinkable circumstances.
Helena Citrónová sang "Love It Was Not" at Auschwitz. The title was prophetic—what existed between her and Wunsch defies simple labels.
Was it love? Survival? Manipulation? All of the above?
We'll never know for certain. What we know is this: she sang, and she lived. In a place designed to silence voices forever, hers endured.
And now, decades after her death, we remember: Helena Citrónová. A young woman who dreamed of singing on stage in Prague. Who instead sang in Auschwitz. Who survived the unsurvivable.
Her story doesn't offer easy lessons or comfortable conclusions. It offers only this: testimony to the complexity of human experience, even—especially—in humanity's darkest hour.
Never forget. Not the horror, not the complexity, not the voices that faced the unthinkable and lived to tell impossible truths.

Rusty Vanranch

12/02/2025

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