DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (14 page)

For four days, I was without any food or water. I was very hungry, very thirsty. But I stayed in the attic because I was also very frightened.

Then one day I looked out from the window and saw a jeep. It was carrying American soldiers. I was so weak, I couldn’t walk, and so I crawled on my hands and knees from the attic to the jeep.

The American GIs spotted me and rescued me. They carried me in their arms to their jeep, and they gave me candy and chocolates. But I was so sick, I couldn’t even eat them.

The GIs took me to one of their doctors near Linz, in Austria, who treated me. Then they gave me a little uniform to wear-an American GI uniform.

I became their mascot. I would stand in line to get food, just like the other soldiers. But they let me go to the head of the line. They gave me dollars, toys, suitcases filled with candy.

I told them what had happened to me, how I had been at Auschwitz, and that my entire family had been killed. Some American soldiers in the group offered to take me home with them to America. But I got very sick, and they had to leave me behind. I came down with a high fever, and I was diagnosed as having typhoid. I was put in a convent hospital in Linz, where for four months I lay in bed. I couldn’t even open my eyes.

I never saw the American soldiers again.

I told the people in the convent I wanted to go home-to Hungary.

When Mauthausen seemed in danger of falling to the Russians in May 1945, Mengele quickly shed his SS uniform and donned the outfit of a soldier of the Wehrmacht. He joined a German field hospital, submerging himself in the sea of embittered soldiers of the defeated army. The unit wandered between U.S.-and Soviet-held territories. At last, the unit surrendered to the American Army, and with his comrades, Mengele became a prisoner of war.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: We were liberated much later than the other twins. In fact, when we first heard the war was over-we didn’t believe it.

After the Death March, we had ended up in a small town in Germany called Pritzberg, and everything was very chaotic, very confused.

Someone shouted,

“The war is over,” and we thought they were joking.

When we realized it was true, we didn’t know where to go, what to do.

We wandered through the streets of Pritzberg, crying, in our torn, dirty dresses.

Some French soldiers in the town noticed us. They felt sorry for us-two fourteen-year-old girls, obviously war orphans. They picked us up in their jeep and brought us to their headquarters. There, we were fed-our first real meal since before the war.

It was hard to communicate with the French soldiers. We spoke no French or German-only Hungarian. But they were very nice. We were able to make them understand how much we wanted to go home-to our hometown in Hungary. They gave us two suitcases and some cans of sardines, and they put Us on a train bound for Hungary.

But instead of taking us home, it went in the opposite direction, to Czechoslovakia. At last, we managed to board a train to our hometown.

There, we were met by two widowed uncles-the only members of our family who had survived.

We told them we were left alive because we were twins.

They took us by our old house. Everything had been taken-there was nothing left that had belonged to our family.

It was so sad. We couldn’t stop crying.

Confined to a POW camp near Munich, Mengele became deeply depressed and even contemplated suicide, according to his written account of that period. He confided his situation to a fellow prisoner, a doctor named Fritz Ulmann. Ulmann had an extra set of ID papers, which Mengele gratefully accepted: They would be extremely useful should he need to conceal his true identity. He carefully altered the card and became Fritz Hollman. By June 1945, American Occupation forces had begun rounding up Nazi functionaries and throwing them in jails and internment camps. More than fifty-thousand suspected Nazis-Gestapo heads, Hitler Youth leaders, members of the Nazi Peasants’ League, SS officers-were imprisoned.

Mengele would have been a prime candidate for automatic arrest had the Americans been able to identified’ him. They believed they had developed a foolproof technique for singling out former members of the SS. Since all SS officers had been required to have their blood group tattooed beneath one arm, American soldiers looked for the tattoo itself or for a sign that it had been removed. As it turned out, Mengele’s supreme vanity saved him: When he had joined the Waffen SS in 1940, he had refused on aesthetic grounds to submit to the tattoo. On August 18, 1945, Mengele was released from the POW camp by soldiers who saw no evidence that he had been in the SS.

According to his son, Rolf, Mengele returned to his parents’ home in Gunzburg sometime during that summer. He did not stay with them because it was too dangerous; instead, he was forced to hide out in the woods, where his family furtively provided him with food. But U.S. Occupation forces were establishing outposts around Germany, and Mengele was compelled to seek another hiding place, according to an autobiographical novel he wrote years after the war. The “novel” was among the papers Rolf turned over to the German magazine Bunte in

1985.

Bunte obligingly gave it to the German prosecutors, who passed it along to the United States Justice Department. Although purportedly a fictional account of the adventures of a World War II veteran, the book so closely dovetails with actual events in Mengele’s postwar life that it was used by the Justice Department in piecing together the war criminal’s path after leaving Auschwitz. Mengele evidently decided to contact Ulmann’s brotherin-law, a doctor practicing near Munich (he is described pseudonymously in the novel).

This doctor sympathized with the war criminal’s plight, and provided Mengele with the name of a farmer who could provide him with temporary refuge.

Mangolding, a small farming community outside Munich, had not been touched by the war. When Mengele arrived at the farm of George Fischer, he told the farmer he was a refugee in need of a job.

In an interview with Bunte magazine in 1985, Fischer revealed that he agreed to take Mengele on as a farmhand if the young man proved he could do the job. His first task was to sort the potato crop, separating potatoes suitable for human consumption from those of inferior quality, which could be used as animal feed. He was to make two piles: good potatoes to the right and bad ones to the left.

Fischer warned Mengele to choose carefully; with the scarcity of food, potatoes were a precious commodity.

Mengele concentrated on the task at hand, and exerted himself to do it well-taking as much care, perhaps, as when he had served on the selection ramp of Auschwitz. He distinguished himself at potato culling and got the job. As a farmhand, not only was He safe from the authorities, but in the midst of the confusion, starvation, and poverty engulfing the rest of Germany, Mengele was assured a good home and plenty of food. He even had time to devote to his favorite activity, reading. He read voraciously, staying up late to finish a book, then rising early the next morning to do his chores.

To the Fischer family, Mengele displayed many of the endearing qualities of the Beppo of old. He kept the family entertained with his light banter. The household took a deep liking to their new hired hand, especially the Fischers’ small children. On Christmas Eve, he played Saint Nicholas for them. According to the Fischer family, Mengele gave a hilarious performance impersonating the crotchety, benevolent German Father Christmas. Mengele’s reputation as a thespian was assured, and thereafter he was frequently called upon to entertain.

The only member of the household who distrusted Mengele was the farmer’s brother, Alois. Noting Mengele’s odd habit of washing his hands after finishing every chore, Alois concluded he had never been a farmhand or a soldier, and figured out that their stylish employee was probably a wanted high-ranking Nazi, using his brother’s house to hide out. But he didn’t give Mengele away. The war criminal was able to lead a relatively peaceful life for over three years. Of course, toiling as a farmhand was a blow to Mengele’s self-esteem, but his notebooks reveal he consoled himself by dreaming of his future, when he would return to his science and his experiments. Mengele’s greatest source of anxiety came from not having news of his family. He didn’t dare show himself in Gunzburg again, but like all the refugees of this long and devastating war, he longed to know how his parents and brothers, his wife and his son, were doing.

MENASHE LORINCZI: Neither Lea nor I knew after the war that our father was alive. We assumed he had suffered the same fate as our mother.

After several months under the Russians’ care at the Auschwitz clinic, Lea and I left the concentration camp and tried to find our way home, to Cluj.

There were still thousands of survivors wandering around Eastern Europe, trying to find their way back home. It was very difficult.

Much of Eastern Europe’s rail system had been heavily bombed. Even months after Liberation, it was not functioning properly. We would board a train, and a few kilometers along the way we would get to a river and the train would stop, unable to continue because a bridge had been bombed. All the passengers were forced to get out, wade through the river, walk to a village, and wait for days until another train arrived.

It took several months for us to make it back home to Cluj. We found one uncle-our only relative to have survived.

Unbeknownst to Lea and me, our father had spent the war in the relative safety of a Russian labor camp. He’d spent the last months of the War and Liberation mourning his entire family, certain all of us had perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Ironically, he found out we were still alive because of a newspaper article-one that quoted me at the time of Liberation. The interviews I gave to the press corps who came to inspect Auschwitz after Liberation were published all over the world. An account of my experiences under Dr. Mengele even found its way to a Russian newspaper widely read in my father’s labor camp.

My sister and I were identified by name-as was our father. As a result of this story, he learned my twin sister and I were still alive.

LEA LORINCZI: Our father began making intensive efforts to locate us.

He had no idea where we or our mother might be. At last, he found out we were back in our old hometown in Cluj. After he pleaded with the Russians, they agreed to release him from labor camp. He was put on a transport with sick people and began the long journey to Cluj.

One day, he turned up at our door.

The reunion was heartbreaking. He didn’t know what had happened to our mother. “Where is Mommy?” he kept asking us.

MENASHE LORINCZI: I will never forget that day as long as I live. We were laughing and crying at the same time.

Father took my sister and me in his arms. Then he sat down. He put me on one knee and Lea on the other. He wouldn’t stop kissing us. And we couldn’t stop crying.

We didn’t have the heart to tell him what we suspected: that she’d perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

It took a long time before we could talk to our father about the last time we saw our mother. In the meantime, he moved in with us and we started life anew. We were so happy to be with him-but we were also so sad, because our mother was not with us.

As refugees kept coming back, we would ask them about our mother what had happened to her, did they ever see her? Her fate was a complete mystery. The answer was always,

“We don’t know.”

Anxious for news about his wife and family, Mengele asked his friend the doctor to visit Gunzburg. Ulmann’s brotherin-law was going on vacation and would be passing the Bavarian town, so he was glad to oblige. Once in Gunzburg, he discreetly sought meetings with various members of Josef’s family. He let everyone know their beloved Beppo was safe.

Meanwhile, the once-proud Mengele family had problems of its own. The indomitable Walburga was deathly ill; she would expire shortly after the New Year, in 1946. Mengele’s father was being scrutinized by U.S. Occupation authorities for his Nazi involvement during the war. It would not be long before he would be placed in a detention camp.

Lolo, Josef’s younger brother, who had fought in France, was also a POW, languishing in a camp in Yugoslavia. As for Irene and little Rolf, they had moved after the war from Freiburg to the Gunzburg area and were being taken care of by the Mengele family. Because of the famine that was ravaging Germany, Irene had had no choice but to leave her hometown: at least in Gunzburg, with her wealthy in-laws, she could be assured of food for herself and little Rolf. But she had left Freiburg, a lively center of culture, somewhat reluctantly for stifling Gunzburg. Irene’s parents accompanied her and the child, and together, they rented a house in nearby Autenried.

Irene learned that her husband was surviving, but she knew little of how he was faring in these dangerous times. American Army investigators had been to Gunzburg inquiring after her husband’s whereabouts. By late 1945, the search for Nazi war criminals, rather than dying down, had intensified, as the Allies made preparations for war crimes trials. Specialists at the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, whose regional headquarters were in Augsburg, thirty minutes away from Gunzburg, joined the search, as did many other units and agencies.

As survivors emerged to talk about Auschwitz, Dr. Mengele’s name was heard more and more frequently. Although many doctors had served on the selection ramp of Birkenau, victims seemed to recall Josef Mengele most vividly, hence the start of the legend surrounding the Angel of Death. The image of the elegant young SS doctor who whistled and smiled as he sent people to die was indelibly imprinted in their memories.

Only the twins remained silent. Several had made it back to their native villages and moved in with distant relatives. After their ordeal with the Nazis, they were relieved to be home, although their homes had changed: They were now under the control of the Communists.

Some were scattered in relocation centers and orphanages throughout Europe, awaiting transport to Palestine. Still others were in Catholic convents being cared for by nuns, along with other war orphans.