The Nine Hundred, a new book on the young Jewish women from Slovakia who were the first inmates at Auschwitz, reveals how the love of a Nazi guard saved two sisters from the gas chamber – but at a terrible price

Helena Citron’s father appeared to her in a dream. He told her that her sister Ruzinka had been hiding as a gentile and had been caught.

The next day at lunch, Irena Fein and some of the other girls were sorting the clothes of Hungarian Jews when they saw Helena’s sister, Ruzinka and her children in line for the gas. The girls must have seen the white-blond hair of her little girl, Aviva, and then recognised Ruzinka, who was carrying a newborn infant in her arms.

“Come! Come! Helena!” the girls whispered. “Ruzinka’s coming.”

The dream had been true.

Stricken with anguish and grief, Helena hid behind the mounds of clothes. She did not want to see her sister before she died. What was the point? How could she continue living? An internal debate waged inside her mind and heart. “I knew about all the people who had been exterminated, my whole family, my three brothers, my parents and my older sister with three lovely children, but this is my last sister.”

Then something clicked inside, and she revolted against her own timidity.

What was she hiding for? Helena did not understand her own reaction.

She ran to the window. Her elder sister, Ruzinka, was holding Aviva’s hand and holding an infant in her arms. Helena was an aunt again, and she didn’t even know it.

Read the article by Heather Dune Macadam (SA Weekend) in The Advertiser.