The Jew Whose Love Affair With a Nazi Saved Others in Auschwitz
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Are the Abraham Accords being rolled back? (podcast)
Why Anne Frank’s diary became world famous (video)
A match made in … Auschwitz? (podcast)
Western Wall stones undergo inspection (article)
A Torah portion’s insight into antisemitism (video)
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Bat-Sheva Dagan, a Polish teenager, and other Jewish women worked as prisoners at Auschwitz, sorting through suitcases which were unloaded from trains transporting tens of thousands of innocent people to the death camp.
The women were heavily supervised by Nazi guards, including a young officer named Franz Wunsch. Given that he was in charge, it seemed strange that Franz spent so much time on the processing floor, where the Jewish women worked.
Soon, however, Bat-Sheva became suspicious of Franz, often noticing him in conversation with Helena Citron, her fellow prisoner and coworker.
“He would speak to her and nobody else,” Bat-Sheva later said. “I watched from a distance, but it looked like they had something between them.”1
As unimaginable as it sounds, the two were engaged in a completely forbidden romance against the backdrop of a gas chamber.