DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (12 page)

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I still remember when they moved us into the Gypsy camp. It was very cold-below zero-and it was snowing.

MENASHE LORINCZI: We thought it was the end of us.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: They made us stand outside because a prisoner was missing. We stood for hours in the cold, in the snow, until they found this prisoner.

But as a result, my sister Ruthie got severe frostbite. Her feet were frozen. She had to have an operation, and they removed some of her toes.

She could not walk after that.

Back home, in Hungary, Ruthie had always been the livelier twin.

She had loved to dance.

Ruthie kept asking my mother if we would ever go home, and if she would ever dance again.

That was her main concern-whether she would dance again.

4.

THE ANGEL VANISHES.

For the inmates of Auschwitz, December 31, 1944, marked the long awaited time of hope and celebration. The camp was quiet that New Year’s Eve.

Many of the SS guards and commandants were no longer there, having fled to avoid being captured. The Russian Army was now just a few kilometers away.

At previous New Year’s festivities, bedraggled inmates of the death camp orchestra had played through the night for the Nazis. Prisoners would lie awake listening to the drunken revelry. But this year, the only music to be heard was the soft whir of Russian planes circling overhead. Air-raid sirens sounded intermittently, plaintive and insistent.

A furtive party was held in Dr. Mengele’s infirmary by a group of nurses and doctors who were also prisoners. The celebrants traded news about the fall of Berlin and the imminent Russian arrival; they toasted the future by clinking cups of soup.

Auschwitz was no longer the formidable death camp it had been.

Those Nazis who remained on duty through New Year’s were busy trying to cover their tracks. They scurried around destroying documents and photographs, attempting to obliterate any evidence that would reveal the enormity of their crimes. Many of the crematoriums had already been dismantled, the culmination of a process undertaken in November and December on direct orders from the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin.

Several of the warehouses containing the personal belongings of the Jews had been emptied of their goods. Between December and January, for instance, 514,843 articles of men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing were shipped out, according to an official Nazi report.

But the camp where four million people had passed through-of whom only sixty thousand survived-had more evidence than even the Nazis’ able hands could destroy. Entire storerooms remained intact, crammed from floor to ceiling with the belongings of the millions.

One morning in late December, Mengele had marched into his laboratory and announced it was being moved to another crematorium.

The equipment was carefully packed away and transported to the one crematorium that was still operational. The German Army was in shambles and the Russians just weeks away from storming the camp, yet Mengele ordered his assistants to set up the dissecting tables exactly as before, in preparation for more “work.”

Although Mengele was maintaining his usual studied nonchalance to the last, he was secretly planning his own escape. But unlike the other camp doctors, who destroyed their work, Mengele didn’t want the results from a single experiment to be destroyed, or worse, to fall into the hands of the despised Russians. Mengele apparently took steps to safeguard his work. Key slides and specimens were carefully packed and sent to Gunzburg for safekeeping. He could only hope that Professor Verschuer in Berlin-Dahlem would find some way to preserve the hundreds of documents, reports, tissue samples, and organs he had sent him over the last eighteen months.

Late one night, sometime in the middle of January-no one is certain exactly when-the Angel of Death vanished. He had betrayed no hint he would be leaving, even as he visited the twins and inspected the surviving women of Birkenau for what he knew would be the last time.

One prisoner did notice him putting boxloads of documents intO a waiting car. He left the camp so stealthily that for days even some of his assistants failed to realize Mengele was gone. He was one of the last SS doctors to leave Auschwitz.

The remaining SS command was torn between a desire to destroy all remaining evidence, which would take time, and the more primitive mandate of Sauve qui peut-getting away while they still could. In just a few days, the SS managed to blow up the most damning evidence of all: the crematoriums that were still standing. Explosions ripped the ovens that had consumed so many millions, until all that was left of them were heaps of ashes and piles of smoking rubble. The Nazis also set fire to the

“Kanada,” the storage room filled with so many treasures that the inmates had named it after that faraway country whose very name conjured up visions of wealth.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: The whole camp was burning.

The Germans placed explosives under the barracks and storerooms.

They were setting fire to different parts of the camp.

We thought the Germans were going to burn us alive. We ran out of our barracks. The sky was red with flames. It looked like an inferno It was a terrible period. The Germans were leaving the camp, and taking with them anyone who was able to go.

But my sister, Ruthie, couldn’t walk. She was very sick.

My mother decided then and there we were going to leave the camp.

She got a wheelbarrow-God knows from where-and lined it with blankets and pillows. She stuck Ruthie in the wheelbarrow, took me by the hand, and started walking. She was prepared to wheel Ruthie out of Auschwitz.

But a woman saw the three of us walking together and told my mother, “Are you crazy? Where are you going to go with your small children?”

She told her to go back to the barracks and stay there.

My mother went to some of the storerooms and grabbed things for us.

She took sweaters-coats-blankets-from among the beautiful items the Jews had brought. The Nazis had kept them in excellent order.

Eager to avoid the oncoming Russians, any guards still left at the camp had rounded up most of the remaining adult prisoners and marched them off into the frigid Polish winter to destinations unknown.

Many of the twins were forced to join this Death March, as it later came to be called. With defeat finally imminent, the Nazi guards were even more brutal toward the enfeebled veterans of the concentration camp than ever before.

VERA BLAU: Anyone who stopped was shot instantly.

My sister, Rachel, kept saying she couldn’t go on, that she had no strength to walk anymore. And so I decided to drag her along. I grabbed her by her coat and dragged her through the snow.

For four days, we walked in the snow. It was extremely cold. Once, we were given hot water to drink. I spilled the hot water, and it fell into my shoe. It was so cold, my foot got frozen.

LEAH STERN: The Nazis gave us neither food nor drink during this march.

We were so thirsty, we wanted to swallow some of the snow. But the Germans wouldn’t even let us do that.

The snow came to our knees. My sister, Hedvah, and I were wearing very thin clothes. We huddled under a blanket as we trudged through the snow. I was so weak, I kept wanting to stop, but my twin wouldn’t let me.

She decided we had to lighten our load to make walking easier.

First, we threw away the blanket. We even tossed out some bread we had taken with us. For weeks prior to leaving Auschwitz, we’d been saving this bread. But even those little crusts of stale bread were proving to be too heavy for us to carry.

When it looked like I was going to collapse. Hedvah hoisted me on her shoulder and carried me. She saved my life.

ALEX DEKEL: We were forced to march in the freezing cold from Poland, through Czechoslovakia, to Austria and the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Every step I walked, I would sink to my knees and pray to God to kill me. I would get up, walk, and fall again, and again ask for death.

ZYL THE SAILOR: We started the Death March with about twenty thousand people. After two or three weeks, we arrived at the Mauthausen concentration camp with three thousand people-maybe only two thousand.

On this march, the Nazis treated us worse than animals. They did whatever they wanted with us.

I recall marching across big fields, and hearing shooting. To this day, I can still hear the sound of these gun shots. Since that time, I have fought in many wars, and I have heard many different kinds of shootings, but I still remember this shooting more clearly than any other.

We kept marching and hearing these shots in the background. We came to a big river between two hills, and we were told to run. And so we ran.

There was only one soldier, with only one machine gun, and he was shooting at us as we ran.

And today, I live with this memory, and I am ashamed. I ask myself how could we have been so stupid? Because today I realize there was only one SS man doing the shooting, and hundreds-maybe thousands-of people who were running, terrified of this one, solitary SS man.

The twins who evaded the Death March remained at the largely deserted concentration camp. There was neither food nor water. With no guards in sight, those still at Auschwitz plundered any storerooms still left standing. Hoping that the rumors the Russians were on their way were true, Mengele’s children waited to be rescued.

PETER SOMOGYL: We were terrified the Nazis would come back. Even without German soldiers, there was no sense of security.

We were very hungry. There was no food, no food at all.

One morning, I decided to go out and hunt for food. I walked around the deserted camp. But all I found was a big warehouse filled with cases of bottled water. And so I picked up some bottles and brought them back to the twins.

Several of the male twins were together, and our Twins’ Father was still with us, watching over us. He wanted to leave immediately and go east. He, too, was afraid the Nazis would return and take us prisoner-and we’d have no second chance.

Then one day we looked up to see the first Russian troops…

On January 27, 1945, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Russian soldiers marched into Auschwitz. They found the twins huddled inside one of the barracks. They were cold and hungry. Many were suffering from typhoid fever and dysentery. Their frail, emaciated bodies still bore needle marks from the blood tests and injections that had been administered up to the end.

But they were alive! Mengele’s twins were among the only children to have survived Auschwitz.

The first thing the Russians did was to distribute clothing and blankets. The twins were given the camp’s striped uniforms, which they had never had to wear before. The jackets and trousers were so big the children had to stuff layer after layer of clothing to keep them from falling off.

That night, there was a big party to celebrate the liberation. The emaciated women of Birkenau discovered longlost sources of energy within their frail bodies. In their joy, they danced all night with the Russian soldiers. Mengele’s twins stood by happily, watching the adult goings-On.

The next day, the dazed children were marched out of the camp.

The scene was captured by Russian cameramen as part of a propaganda film that would show the world how the Russian Army had rescued Jewish children from Fascist hands. The twins had to roll up their sleeves and show their tatooed numbers for close-up shots. They were led out of Auschwitz several times, until the director was satisfied the liberation scene looked sufficiently authentic.

As they passed through the gates of Auschwitz, twins clutched each other tightly. Amid the euphoria of the liberation was the aching sadness felt by all the children, knowing they were leaving Auschwitz without the families with whom they had arrived. The camp lay behind them like a vast cemetery, filled with the unmarked graves of their loved ones.

Journalists descended on Auschwitz in the immediate aftermath of the liberation, demanding to get the story that had eluded them for so many years: the story of the Nazis’ systematic slaughter of millions of Jews in one cold and forsaken corner of Poland. Menashe Lorinczi, a twin who had worked as Mengele’s messenger boy, volunteered to be their tour guide. Menashe took both reporters and Russian soldiers through the maze of buildings and barracks that made up AuschwitzBirkenau, pointing out the various facilities. To his pride and delight, he became an instant hero, the first child survivor to be interviewed and quoted in newspapers around the world.

MENgele LoRINGzI: Right after talking with the journalists and touring Auschwitz with them, I collapsed. The Russians put me in an infirmary they had set up at the camp.

I lay in bed for months, suffering from one illness after the other.

My teeth fell out. I developed a lung infection, then tuberculosis.

Months after the liberation of Auschwitz, I was still sick, still in the concentration camp, with my twin sister at my side.

Some of the twins who were well and did not require hospitalization were bundled out of Auschwitz and taken to a large monastery in the Polish city of Katowice. There, for the first time in years, they were given plenty of food, clothing, and even toys. Best of all, they were free to roam the city. There were joyful rides on the streetcar, where they merely had to show the tattooed number on their arm for the driver to let them on without exacting a fare. At the monastery, the only discipline the nuns imposed on the children was requiring them to come back in time for meals, which were served promptly three times a day.

EVA MOZES: I will never forget that monastery. The first night, Miriam and I were put in a beautiful room with a large bed, covered by the whitest sheets I had ever seen. The room was filled with toys. I had no idea what to do with all those toys. I felt so filthy and dirty-no one had bothered to give us a bath, you see. I had lice crawling all over me.

And so, that first night, I removed the sheet from the bed and fell asleep on the bare mattress.

Zyl Spiegel, who at thirty was one of the oldest of Mengele’s twins, the one they had lovingly called