Part 1

The air in the transport crate was thick with the scent of fear and unwashed bodies, a suffocating blanket that pressed against my lungs as the train rattled across the desolate plains of Eastern Europe. It was March 1942, a time when the world seemed to have folded in on itself, leaving only the rhythmic clatter of iron wheels and the quiet whimpering of ninety-six other girls who, like me, had been promised “government work.” We were young, barely twenty, with dreams of Prague and dancing still fresh in our minds, unaware that we had been sold by our own neighbors for 500 Marks a head—the price of a used bicycle.

When the doors finally creaked open, the biting chill of the Polish wind didn’t just hit us; it bit through our thin coats like a predator. I remember the blinding floodlights, the barking of dogs that sounded more like demons, and the silhouettes of men in Hugo Boss uniforms that looked too sharp for the filth surrounding them. This was Auschwitz. The sign above the gate promised “Work Sets You Free,” but the smell of scorched hair and sweet, heavy ash hanging in the midnight sky told a different story.

I was Helena. Back in my small town, my father was a cantor, and my brother promised I’d sing on the big stages one day. Now, I stood on a platform of crushed gravel, my hair shorn to the scalp, my identity replaced by a series of ink-blue numbers burned into my forearm. The first few months were a blur of breaking stone and watching friends collapse under the weight of rubble. We weren’t allowed to run, even when the walls we were demolishing began to crumble. I watched a girl I’d known since primary school disappear under a mountain of brick, her hand the last thing I saw—pale and reaching for a sky that had turned its back on us.

By October, I was a ghost of myself, sleeping on bug-ridden straw and waiting for my turn to walk toward the chimneys. But fate, in its cruel and twisted irony, had one more card to play. I was transferred to the “Canada” warehouse—the place where the belongings of the murdered were sorted. It was a place of grotesque riches: piles of silk dresses, mountains of shoes, and suitcases filled with the ghosts of families who would never reclaim them.

On my first day there, an SS officer named Franz Wunsch walked in. He was the enemy. He was the man who oversaw our slow destruction. But that afternoon, there was a small performance—a desperate attempt by the prisoners to feel human for five minutes. I stood up to sing. I sang with a passion that came from the gut, believing with every fiber of my being that these notes would be the last thing I ever left in this world.

When I finished, the room went silent. I looked up, my eyes stinging with tears, expecting a blow or a barked order. Instead, I saw him. Franz Wunsch stepped forward, his eyes—not the eyes of a murderer I had come to expect, but the eyes of a man—locked onto mine.

“Please,” he whispered, his voice cracking the cold air. “Sing it again.”

In that moment, under the flickering lights of a warehouse filled with stolen lives, the boundary between victim and executioner blurred. I didn’t know then that this man would become my protector, my secret, and my ultimate tragedy. I didn’t know that his love would save my life while he helped end thousands of others.

PART 2: THE SHADOW OF MERCY
The transition from the outdoor demolition unit to the “Canada” warehouse wasn’t just a change of scenery; it was a shift from one circle of hell to another, slightly more comfortable one. But comfort in a place like this was a ghost—it haunted you with the guilt of still being alive while the smoke from the chimneys blacked out the sun.

Franz Wunsch didn’t just “notice” me that day I sang. He chose me. In the weeks that followed, the warehouse became a theater of the absurd. Outside, the world was a cacophony of barking dogs, shouting guards, and the rhythmic thud of the gas chamber doors. Inside, there was a silence so heavy it felt like it could crush your ribs. Franz would come to my station often. At first, I would stiffen, my hands shaking as I sorted through mountains of silk slips and wool coats, waiting for the blow that usually followed an officer’s arrival.

But the blow never came. Instead, there were small, terrifying acts of kindness.

One afternoon, when the wind was howling through the gaps in the wooden slats of the warehouse, I felt a presence behind me. I kept my head down, my fingers numbly folding a child’s velvet dress—a dress that still smelled faintly of lavender and home. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I flinched, expecting to be shoved, but the touch was light, almost hesitant.

“You’re freezing, Helena,” he whispered. His voice was low, devoid of the jagged authority he used with the other guards.

He didn’t wait for a response. He reached into his heavy overcoat and pulled out a small parcel wrapped in a clean handkerchief. He tucked it into the folds of my striped tunic and walked away without another word. When I finally dared to look, I found a piece of white bread—real bread, not the sawdust-filled brick we were fed—and a thick slab of butter. I ate it in the shadows, crying not from joy, but from the sheer, agonizing realization that my survival was now tied to the man who represented my people’s destruction.

The notes started appearing soon after. Small scraps of paper hidden in the pockets of coats I was assigned to sort. “I fell in love with you,” he wrote. “I dream of a world where we aren’t here.” I wanted to burn them. I wanted to scream at him that there was no “world” left for people like us. He was a monster in a polished uniform, and I was a number, a piece of property sold for 500 Marks. How dare he speak of love while the ash of my neighbors settled on the roof of our warehouse?

But the human spirit is a treacherous thing. It wants to live, even at the cost of its dignity.

By mid-winter, I contracted typhus. It was the great reaper of the camps. One morning, I couldn’t stand. My head felt like it was being split by an axe, and my skin was a map of fire and chills. In Auschwitz, if you couldn’t work, you were “selected.” The infirmary was just a waiting room for the ovens.

Franz found me collapsed behind a mountain of suitcases. I remember the blurred image of his face—the high cheekbones, the clear eyes that seemed so out of place in this landscape of rot. He didn’t call the guards. He didn’t report me. Instead, he carried me to a hidden crawlspace beneath the floorboards of the sorting room.

For two weeks, I lived in the dark, breathing in the scent of dust and old leather. Franz became my shadow protector. He brought me medicine stolen from the SS infirmary. He brought me clean water and his own rations. He would sit by the opening of my hiding spot during his shift, talking to me in a low voice about his mother in Austria, about the mountains, about anything that wasn’t the smell of burning flesh outside.

“Why?” I managed to croak one night, my fever finally breaking. “Why are you doing this? You know what I am. You know what your people do to mine.”

He was silent for a long time. I could hear the click of his boots on the floor above me. “Because when you sang,” he said, his voice echoing in the small space, “I remembered what it felt like to be a man, Helena. Not an officer. Not a soldier. Just a man. I can’t let that memory die.”

I hated him for that answer. I hated that he used me to redeem his own soul. But when the fever left me and I crawled back out into the light, I was alive. I was a ghost, a walking skeleton, but I was alive.

The true test of this “mercy” came when the transports from Slovakia increased. Every day, thousands arrived. Every day, we sorted their lives into piles: Shoes. Eyeglasses. Toys. Human hair. It was a factory of death, and I was one of its cogs.

Then, the nightmare became personal.

Word reached me through the prisoner grapevine—a fragile, desperate network of whispers—that a new transport had arrived from my hometown. My sister, Róžika, was on it. Along with her nine-year-old daughter and her newborn son.

The blood drained from my face. I didn’t think. I didn’t plan. I ran.

I burst out of the warehouse, ignoring the screams of the kapos, and raced toward the Ramp. The scene was a chaotic sea of misery. Families being torn apart, the elderly being shoved into trucks, the young being lined up for the long walk to the “showers.”

I saw her. Róžika was holding her baby, her face a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. My niece was clinging to her coat, her eyes wide and searching for a father who wasn’t there.

“Róžika!” I screamed, but my voice was swallowed by the roar of the engines and the barking of dogs.

Suddenly, a heavy hand slammed into my shoulder, spinning me around. It was a guard, his rifle raised. “Back to your unit, Jew!” he barked.

I fell to my knees, sobbing, pointing toward my sister. “Please! That’s my sister! Please!”

A shadow fell over me. It was Franz. But this wasn’t the man who whispered to me in the dark. This was the SS officer. His face was cold, his eyes hard as flint. He looked at me, then at the guard, then at the line where my sister stood.

He knew. He saw the desperation in my eyes. He saw the “Angel of Death,” Dr. Mengele, standing just twenty yards away, casually pointing his thumb to the left or right—life or death.

Franz did the only thing he could to save me from being executed on the spot for leaving my post. He swung his hand and struck me across the face. The force of the blow sent me sprawling into the mud.

“You stupid girl!” he roared, his voice thick with a manufactured rage that chilled me to the bone. He began to kick me, his boots hitting my ribs, but through the pain, I heard his voice, a frantic whisper that barely reached my ears.

“Tell me her name! Quickly! What is her name?”

“Róžika,” I gasped, blood pooling in my mouth. “Róžika Citrónová. She has two children, Franz. Two children!”

He didn’t answer. He turned to the guard. “I’ll handle this one. She’s one of mine from Canada. She’s lost her mind.”

He dragged me toward the crematorium area, his grip like iron on my arm. My eyes were locked on my sister. She was moving closer to Mengele. The baby started to cry. It was a thin, high-pitched sound that seemed to pierce the very sky.

Franz left me slumped against a wall and ran toward the selection line. I watched, my breath catching in my throat, as he approached the officer in charge. He gestured wildly toward Róžika. He was lying—I knew he was lying. He was telling them she was a skilled seamstress, that she was needed for a special project in the warehouse, that her papers had been lost in the shuffle.

He pulled her out of the line. For a second, a flicker of hope ignited in my chest.

But then, the horror settled.

The guard reached for the children. Róžika screamed, a sound that I still hear in my dreams seventy years later. She fought, she clawed, but they were stronger. Franz stood there, his back to me, his shoulders hunched. He could save the woman. He could justify a worker. But he could not save the children. In the eyes of the Reich, they were “useless eaters.”

I watched my niece and the baby being led away. They didn’t even know where they were going. My niece looked back once, her eyes searching for her mother, for me, for anyone to tell her it was okay.

It wasn’t okay.

Franz walked back to me, his face ash-gray. He didn’t look at me. He just grabbed my arm and began hauling me back toward the warehouse. Behind us, the heavy iron doors of the gas chamber creaked shut.

That night, in the silence of the warehouse, Franz wept. He sat on a crate of stolen jewelry, his head in his hands, his body shaking with a grief that seemed too large for a man in that uniform.

I stood across from him, my face swollen from his blows, my heart shattered into a million jagged pieces. I didn’t comfort him. I couldn’t. He had saved my sister, yes. He had saved me. But he was part of the machine that had just turned my niece and nephew into smoke.

“I loved you,” he whispered through his tears.

“Then God help us both,” I replied, “because I think I’m starting to love you too.”

It was the most tragic realization of my life. In this place of absolute evil, the only light I had was a man who helped create the darkness. We were bound together by blood and bread, by mercy and murder. And as the winter deepened and the crematoriums worked through the night, I realized that surviving Auschwitz wasn’t going to be the hard part. The hard part would be living with the ghost of the man who saved me.

PART 3: THE BREAKING POINT
The winter of 1944 didn’t just bring the cold; it brought a heavy, suffocating sense of the end. In the “Canada” warehouse, the pace of work had reached a fever pitch. The transports weren’t just coming; they were flooding in, a tidal wave of humanity being reduced to piles of sorted belongings. I moved like a ghost among the mountains of suitcases, my hands working mechanically, but my mind was a battlefield.

My sister, Róžika, was with me now, saved by the lie Franz had woven. But she was a shadow of the woman she had been. Every time the wind shifted and the sweet, cloying scent of the crematoriums drifted over our warehouse, she would freeze, her eyes glazing over as she looked toward the chimneys where her children had vanished. I had to be strong for her, but who was being strong for me?

Franz. It was always Franz.

Our relationship had morphed into something that defied any logic of the world outside the barbed wire. It was no longer just about survival; it was a bizarre, secret domesticity in the heart of a death camp. He would come to the warehouse at night, risking everything. He didn’t just bring food anymore; he brought news of the world. He told me about the Allied landings in Normandy, about the Soviet steamroller pushing through Poland, about the crumbling walls of the Third Reich.

“It’s almost over, Helena,” he whispered one night, sitting on a pile of confiscated winter coats. “The world is burning, and when the fire reaches these gates, I don’t know if I can get you out.”

I looked at him, really looked at him. In the flickering light of a single oil lamp, he didn’t look like an SS officer. He looked exhausted. His uniform, once so crisp and intimidating, seemed to hang heavy on his shoulders, weighed down by the secrets we shared.

“And you, Franz?” I asked, my voice barely audible. “What happens to you when the fire reaches the gates?”

He looked away, his jaw tightening. “I am a soldier of the Reich, Helena. In their eyes, I am a hero. In your eyes… I don’t know what I am.”

“You are the man who saved my sister,” I said, my heart aching with a truth I didn’t want to admit. “And you are the man who wears the uniform of the people who killed her children. You are both, Franz. That is the tragedy.”

The tension in the camp was reaching a breaking point. The “Sonderkommando”—the prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoriums—knew their time was up. They were the witnesses to the greatest crime in history, and they knew the SS would never let them live to tell the tale.

On October 7, 1944, the air in Auschwitz changed. It wasn’t just the smell of death; it was the smell of rebellion.

I was in the warehouse, sorting a shipment of watches, when the first explosion rocked the ground. My heart leapt into my throat. We ran to the windows, pressing our faces against the glass. Smoke was billowing from Crematorium IV. The Jewish prisoners had revolted. They had smuggled in gunpowder, blown up a furnace, and were fighting back with nothing but rocks, hammers, and a desperate, suicidal courage.

Chaos erupted. The sirens began to wail—a high, piercing scream that signaled the end of order. Guards were running everywhere, their rifles barking as they fired into the crowds of prisoners.

Suddenly, the warehouse door kicked open. Franz burst in, his face flushed, his Luger drawn. He didn’t look at the other women; he made a direct line for me. He grabbed my arm, his grip so tight it left bruises.

“Stay inside!” he commanded, his voice trembling with a raw, unmasked fear. “Do not move from this building. If anyone tries to take you out, tell them you are under my personal orders for a special inventory. Do you understand?”

“Franz, what’s happening?” I cried, clinging to his sleeve.

“The world is ending,” he said, and for the first time, I saw tears in his eyes. “They are killing everyone involved in the revolt. I have to go. If I don’t show up, they’ll suspect me. Just… stay alive, Helena. Please.”

He turned and ran back into the madness. From the window, I watched the horror unfold. The rebellion was crushed with a brutality that defied description. I saw men I had known, men who had shared a crust of bread with me, being lined up and shot in the back of the head.

And then I saw Franz.

He was standing in a line of SS men, his rifle raised. A group of young Jewish men, some no older than twenty, were being herded toward the “Black Wall.” I watched, paralyzed, as Franz leveled his weapon.

Crack.

A young man fell. I didn’t see who fired the shot, but the image of Franz standing there, part of the firing squad, shattered something inside me that had managed to stay whole through all the years of starvation and fear.

The aftermath of the revolt was a reign of terror. The SS was looking for anyone who had helped the prisoners smuggle the gunpowder. I lived in a state of constant, paralyzing dread. If they found out about Franz and me, we wouldn’t just be killed; we would be tortured until we begged for death.

A week later, I was called to the political department—the Gestapo office within the camp. My legs felt like lead as I walked through those doors. I was ushered into a small, windowless room where a man with spectacles sat behind a desk, a file open in front of him.

“Helena Citrónová,” he said, his voice as cold as a scalpel. “Number 26859.”

I stood at attention, my eyes fixed on the wall behind him. “Yes, Herr Oberscharführer.”

“There are rumors,” he said, leaning forward. “Rumors about you and a certain officer in the Canada unit. Rumors about extra rations. About ‘special protections.’”

The air in the room seemed to vanish. I knew that if I faltered, if I blinked, Franz was dead. And so was I.

“I don’t know what rumors you mean,” I said, my voice steady with the strength of a woman who had already lost everything. “I work. I sort the clothes. I follow orders. If an officer gives me a task, I do it.”

He slapped the desk, the sound like a gunshot. “Don’t lie to me! We know Wunsch has been seen with you. We know he brought you medicine when you had the fever. Why would an SS officer risk his life for a Jewish piece of filth like you?”

“Maybe he wanted the warehouse to run efficiently,” I countered, the words tasting like ash. “Maybe he knew that if I died, the sorting of the winter shipments would fall behind. He is a loyal soldier of the Reich, Herr Oberscharführer. He cares about the mission.”

The interrogation lasted for hours. They hit me. They pulled my hair. They threatened to send my sister to the “shredder.” But I didn’t break. Every time I felt like I was going to collapse, I saw Franz’s face in that crawlspace, telling me about the mountains of Austria. I wasn’t just saving him; I was saving the only piece of humanity I had left.

They finally threw me back into my barracks, bruised and bleeding, but alive.

That night, Franz came to me. He slipped through the shadows of the barracks, finding me in my bunk. He didn’t say anything; he just pulled me into his arms and held me as I sobbed into his chest.

“They know, Franz,” I whispered. “They know.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said, his voice hollow. “The Russians are at the Vistula. The orders have already come down to begin the evacuation. They’re going to burn the records. They’re going to blow up the crematoriums.”

He pulled a small, heavy object from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. It was a compass and a small map hand-drawn on a piece of scrap paper.

“When the march starts—and it will be a march, Helena, a death march—stay near the middle of the pack. When you reach the forest near the border, look for the old mill on this map. I have hidden food and civilian clothes there. If we get separated, go there. Wait for me.”

“You’re coming with me?” I asked, hope and terror warring in my chest.

“I can’t,” he said, his voice breaking. “If I desert now, they’ll hunt me down. I have to stay with my unit until the chaos is total. But I will find you, Helena. I swear on my life, I will find you.”

The climax of our story wasn’t a grand romantic gesture. It was a frantic, whispered goodbye in a room that smelled of unwashed bodies and impending doom. We didn’t know if we would see the sunrise, let alone each other.

In the final days of January 1945, the order came. Auschwitz was being liquidated. We were forced out of our barracks and into the biting, sub-zero wind. Thousands of us, a column of walking skeletons, being driven West by guards who were now as desperate as their prisoners.

I looked back one last time as we marched away. The smoke from the chimneys was gone. The silence was absolute, broken only by the crunch of snow under thousands of wooden clogs.

I looked for Franz in the line of guards. For a brief second, our eyes met across the field of white. He didn’t wave. He didn’t smile. He just nodded—a silent, final command to survive.

I clutched the map in my pocket, the paper crinkling like a promise. I didn’t know then that the march would claim thousands of lives. I didn’t know that the “old mill” would be a dream I’d never reach. And I didn’t know that our next meeting wouldn’t be in a forest of freedom, but in a courtroom of judgment.

The decision was made. I would walk. I would breathe. I would live. Not just for myself, and not just for my sister, but for the man who had become my enemy and my savior all at once.

PART 4: THE JUDGMENT OF MEMORY
The “Death March” was a descent into a white, frozen void. We were no longer human beings; we were a long, shivering ribbon of misery stretched across the Polish countryside. Anyone who stumbled, anyone who paused to catch their breath, was met with a bullet. The sound of gunshots behind us became as rhythmic as our own heartbeat. I held Róžika’s hand so tightly that our skin seemed to fuse. The map Franz had given me was a lump of lead in my pocket—a promise of a mill that felt further away with every step through the waist-deep snow.

We never made it to the mill. The chaos of the retreat, the strafing of Soviet planes, and the sheer exhaustion of the march drove us into a different direction. I lost sight of Franz’s unit in the blizzard of late January. The last image I had of him was a silhouette against the grey sky, a soldier disappearing into the fog of a losing war.

On January 27, 1945, the world changed again. The guards simply… vanished. They fled into the woods, shedding their uniforms, trying to become ghosts before the Red Army arrived. When the first Soviet scouts appeared, we didn’t cheer. We didn’t have the strength. We just sat in the snow and stared at them with hollow eyes. I was twenty-two years old, and I had seen the end of the world.

The years that followed were a blur of displacement and reconstruction. I moved to Israel with Róžika. We built new lives on the ruins of the old ones. I married a man named David, a Zionist activist who understood the silence that lived in my eyes. We had two children. I became a mother, a wife, a citizen of a new nation. I buried the name “Franz Wunsch” in a corner of my heart, locked away with the ink-blue numbers on my arm.

I thought the story was over. I thought the past was a country I would never visit again.

But the past has a way of hunting you down.

In 1972, twenty-seven years after I last saw the gates of Auschwitz, a letter arrived at my home in Tel Aviv. It was postmarked from Vienna. My hands shook as I opened it. It wasn’t from Franz. It was from his wife.

She wrote with a desperation that mirrored my own thirty years prior. Franz had been arrested. He was being put on trial for his role at Auschwitz—specifically for his participation in the mass murders and his actions as an SS officer. She had heard the stories, she said. Franz had told her about “the singer.” He had told her that the only thing that kept him human in that hell was a Jewish girl named Helena. She begged me to come to Vienna. She begged me to tell the world that her husband wasn’t a monster.

The conflict that erupted inside me was violent. My friends, my community, the very state of Israel demanded justice. To testify for an SS man was seen as the ultimate betrayal. “He was a Nazi!” they shouted. “He was part of the machine that turned our families to ash!”

They were right. He was.

But I looked at Róžika, who was still alive because of him. I felt the phantom warmth of the bread he had stolen for me when I was dying of typhus. I remembered the kiss in the dark as the world was ending. I realized that the truth wasn’t a straight line; it was a jagged, bleeding wound.

I traveled to Vienna.

The courtroom was cold, filled with the heavy scent of old wood and the oppressive weight of history. When I walked to the witness stand, the room went silent. I felt the eyes of the world on me—the eyes of the survivors, the eyes of the vengeful, and finally, the eyes of the man in the dock.

Franz.

He was fifty years old now. The sharp, terrifying officer was gone, replaced by a grey-haired man in a modest suit. His face was lined with the passage of decades, but his eyes… they were the same. The same eyes that had looked at me in the “Canada” warehouse and asked me to sing.

For the first time in nearly thirty years, our gazes met. I felt a surge of emotion so powerful I had to grip the railing to stay upright. It was love. It was hate. It was the smell of the warehouse. It was the scream of the sirens. It was everything.

I spoke slowly. I told the court about the bread. I told them how he had hidden me when I was sick. I told them how he had risked his life to pull my sister from the line of the gas chambers. I told them that in a place designed to strip away every shred of humanity, Franz Wunsch had chosen to see me as a person.

But the law is not built on gratitude. The prosecutor stood up, holding a stack of documents.

“Mrs. Citrónová,” he said, his voice echoing. “You have told us of his kindness to you. But did you see him with the others? Did you see him with the men who were not ‘the singer’? Did you see him during the revolt of 1944?”

The memory flashed back: the crack of the rifle, the young man falling in the mud, Franz standing in the firing squad.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I saw him.”

“Did he beat prisoners?”

“Yes,” I said, the word catching in my throat. “He was an SS officer. He did what they did.”

The room erupted. Franz put his head in his hands and began to sob. It wasn’t the controlled cry of a man trying to win sympathy; it was the raw, guttural howl of a man realizing that his salvation and his damnation were sitting in the same chair.

I looked at him, and for the first time in that courtroom, I didn’t see my protector. I saw the tragedy of the human condition. He had saved two lives, and he had participated in the destruction of thousands. He was a man who had found his soul only after he had sold it to the devil.

When the time came for the verdict, the tension was unbearable. The evidence of his participation in mass murder was, as the judge called it, “overwhelming.” But the law in Austria at the time was complex, and the statute of limitations for certain crimes had expired. Most importantly, my testimony had created a “reasonable doubt” about his personal intent—a flicker of humanity that the defense clung to.

Franz Wunsch was acquitted.

As the judge read the words, Franz looked at me. He mouthed something. I couldn’t hear him, but I knew what it was. Thank you.

I didn’t smile. I didn’t nod. I stood up and walked out of that courtroom, through the crowd of shouting protesters and flashing cameras. I didn’t speak to him. We never met in a hallway to exchange a final goodbye. We never had a “happily ever after.”

We were two ghosts who had spent a lifetime haunted by the same nightmare.

I returned to Tel Aviv. I lived out the rest of my days as a woman who had done her duty to the truth, however painful that truth was. People never stopped judging me. Some called me a hero for showing mercy; others called me a collaborator who had forgotten the blood of her own people.

I didn’t care. I knew that in the dark of Auschwitz, the only thing that mattered was the person standing next to you.

Franz died in 2009. I passed away in 2007. They say that in the moments before death, your life flashes before your eyes. I don’t think I saw the trial. I don’t think I saw the march.

I think I saw a young girl with a shaved head, standing on a pile of stolen suitcases, singing a song about a world that no longer existed. And I think I saw a young man in a uniform he didn’t yet know would destroy him, looking at her with the eyes of someone who had just found a reason to breathe.

Our story wasn’t a romance. It was a testament. It was proof that even in the heart of the greatest evil humanity has ever known, a single spark of love—however twisted, however forbidden—can refuse to go out.

The ash has settled. The chimneys are cold. But the song… the song remains.