DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (17 page)

LEA LORINCzI: I cried myself to sleep every night those first years after the war, thinking about my mother. I often dreamt that Mother had come home.

Then, I would get up and realize it was only a dream, and I would start crying again.

It was a period when I felt very sad. I did not want to be with other people. My father was also depressed. He missed our mother very much, and always wanted to talk about her.

MENASHE LORINCZI: My sister was very unhappy, and she tried to forget her sorrow by burying herself in the Communist movement. She was extremely active in it.

She was not a very strong-minded person-she was easily suggestible, and the Communists brainwashed her.

Lea wanted me to join, too, but I knew the Communists were no good. I knew they hated the Jews.

They always claimed to attack only

“Zionists.” But who were the “Zionists”? The Jews. Only the Jews.

I finally had to forcibly yank my sister out of the movement.

After that, I knew that we had to leave Hungary. We had to emigrate to Palestine.

But the Communists wouldn’t let us go.

At the conclusion of his report, which Wolfson submitted to his superiors in November 1946, the investigator recommended that

“SS

Haubsturmfuhrer Dr. Josef Mengele be placed on the wanted list and that he be indicted for war crimes.” At last, the Angel of Death seemed about to get his due.

But Mengele, tucked away in his pastoral hideout, could not have been more removed from the machinations to capture and try him.

He did not know of Wolfson’s report, and was leading a quiet, peaceful life. His major source of anguish stemmed from his longing to be reunited with his family.

Mengele’s homesickness was relieved by a visit from his brother Karl in October 1946. The reunion was bittersweet. Karl confirmed the sad news of their mother’s death and their father’s imprisonment. Karl brought with him Hans Sedlmeier, an old school chum of Josef’s, who was now managing the farm-equipment factory. The Mengeles had been forced to turn over control of the company to Sedlmeier because of the Americans’ interest in disbanding any firms run by ex-Nazis.

Sedlmeier was an ideal interim manager, both because of his loyalty to the Mengeles and the fact that he did not have a Nazi past.

The visit of Karl and Sedlmeier broke Mengele’s isolation. The two men brought Mengele up to date on Gunzburg gossip as well as on how the family business was faring. And afterward, there was a steady stream of visitors to the Mangolding farm area. One day, Irene herself showed up. Their reunion was a curious mixture of tenderness and disaffection. Years later, Mengele relived the meeting in his autobiographical novel: “I never believed that I would see you again,”

lrmgard, the character who represents Irene, tells Andreas. She had apparently lost all hope of being reunited with her husband.

Irene advised Mengele to leave Germany at once; it was simply too dangerous to remain there, she believed. She told him how a few months earlier an American officer and his interpreter had turned up at her house, demanding to know where Mengele was. Although very nervous inside, she had managed to retain her composure. Flashing her nicest smile, Irene had told them the stock story: that Josef Mengele was “missing” in the Eastern Campaign, and was presumed dead.

While the officer had listened sympathetically to the pretty young woman, standing there with her young son, the interpreter-a Jewish soldier-had been more skeptical. He had lashed out at her, informing her that Mengele was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.

The two men had finally driven off, but it had taken all of her energy to convince them she really knew nothing of her husband’s whereabouts.

The tension of having to cover for her war-criminal husband affected Irene deeply, and added to her general unhappiness with her marital situation. Since their marriage, weeks before the start of the war, Irene and her husband had spent little time together. She had stoically borne Josefs going off to war and, after that, to Auschwitz for his scientific career. But now, peace was here at last, the country returning to normal life-yet still they were apart. Her husband was a fugitive, wanted by several governments for his alleged wartime activities. As their son, Rolf, would later reveal, although Irene didn’t believe the accusations leveled against Josef, she found it frustrating not to be with the man she still loved, to be condemned to live by herself, with none of the joys of family life she craved.

TWINS’ FATHER: After the war, all the survivors wanted to get married, to build homes, to forget the Holocaust and what had happened.

I met my wife seven months after Liberation. She came from a small village in Czechoslovakia. She had also been interned in the camps.

We courted exactly four weeks.

We were married on January 27, 1946-exactly one year after Liberation.

My first child was born less than a year later.

We lived in a beautitul city. I had a good job and a very lovely house. Yet neither of us felt settled.

VERA GROSSMAN: When Mother came back to her hometown after the war, she learned that no one in her family had survived. Her parents and her seven brothers and sisters had all gone to the gas chambers. She was completely alone, with two seven-year-old daughters to care for.

The three of us went back to our old estate-but the people who had taken it over threatened to kill us. And so we fled to another town.

Mother got together with another Jewish woman, also a camp survivor.

They rented two small rooms. They would take in geese and feed them-fatten them up-then sell them for a higher price. People loved buying fat geese, because they could get schmaltz -a thick, delicious paste you make from the fat.

Eventually, Mother was able to buy a cow with the money she earned fattening the geese. She was convinced that as long as she had milk for her twins, we would never be hungry again.

But she was always very nervous. She worried about who would take care of us if something happened to her.

One day, a man she had met at Auschwitz turned up at our door.

After Liberation, he had gone off to search for his family. He traveled throughout Europe, to Hungary, to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, in search of survivors. Only after he had determined that no one had survived did he come to us and ask for Mother’s hand.

They were married very quickly. Mother said yes because she felt he would be good to Olga and me, and take care of us. And he did.

He missed his own family, and was very loving toward us.

We moved to another town. There, we rented a large apartment.

Mother stopped working and had a baby. Then she had another baby very quickly afterward. We were a family again.

But there were a lot of rats in that new apartment. It reminded me of Auschwitz. Each time I saw a rat, I thought of Auschwitz.

TWINS’ FATHER: I found I couldn’t feel safe anywhere in Eastern Europe-not after what had happened.

I simply didn’t trust the land where I was living. I had a feeling there was nowhere in Eastern Europe I could really settle down and establish roots.

My wife and I both wanted a place we could call home. We wanted to emigrate to Palestine.

All we could think of was running away from Europe and all its memories.

We wanted out.

To Mengele’s shock and dismay, during her visit Irene told him she wanted out of the marriage, an idea she had obviously been contemplating for some time. A divorce would free her from the innumerable burdens-and few rewards-of being Dr. Mengele’s wife.

Mengele was distraught. “She wants to leave me because I am not back home like the other husbands-as if it were my fault,” the protagonist in his book complains at one point. Mengele was unsympathetic to his wife’s grumblings. The doctor-turned-farmhand had troubles enough of his own. In his book, there is a scene where Andreas berates his wife, sternly reminding her of the thousands of women whose husbands are POWs and who are in equally dire straits.

The reunion with Irene left Mengele feeling depressed and forlorn.

In the manuscript he wrote decades later, he described his sadness at losing both his mother and his wife. Walburga’s death clearly caused him the most pain, however. “One can never replace a mother,” he observes at one point. But the prospect of losing Irene was almost as distressing. It upset Mengele’s dream of once again leading a traditional family life, even though the life he could now offer her hardly fit the typical bourgeois mode.

Although Irene’s advice to leave Germany made eminent sense in this period of manhunts and war-crime trials, Mengele felt safe enough in his farm retreat to risk staying put. Did he really think his notoriety would fade? Could he possibly have believed that the Allies would leave Germany and forget all about him? The smug former dandy of Gunzburg was certainly deluded enough to have entertained such fantasies. Perhaps in his heart he even hoped he would be able to reemerge and resume his old life in his native land. But for now, he was also pragmatic enough to take no chances and remain in hiding.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: Life in our hometown in Hungary was very disappointing, very sad.

We cried all the time.

Only two widowed uncles had survived from our entire family. We were taken to live with them.

These uncles were both very religious and very strict. We quickly realized there was no future for us in Hungary, there were no young people left. There was no Jewish community.

There was nothing-absolutely nothing.

We dreamt of going to Palestine, but our uncles forbid us to join the local Zionist movement, the B’nai Akivah. They didn’t want us in any coeducational groups. We finally were able to find another Zionist group that admitted only girls: Our uncles allowed us to join that.

We decided we wanted to build a new future for ourselves-in Palestine.

The continuing Nuremberg proceedings, in particular the concentration-camp doctors’ trial, should have made life most precarious for Mengele. In the fall of 1946, twenty-three representatives of the Nazi medical establishment were indicted. Of these, twenty were physicians, while the rest had served Nazi science in administrative capacities. It is ironic that this trial, where Mengele ought to have been the star defendant, came and went without him; the Wolfson memorandum, submitted even before the trial opened, had carefully outlined the medical crimes both of Mengele and Verschuer, urging that they be indicted.

Somewhere along the way, however, the report disappeared. What became of it is not known, even to Wolfson, who is now teaching languages for the U.S. Army, and has settled on the West Coast. It may have simply fallen through the cracks, although one can conjure other, far more sinister explanations.

To this day, that Mengele escaped judgment-even in absentia -in the trial of doctors like himself remains a great mystery of the postwar era. More than any of his peers, he exemplified the excesses of Nazi medical science. He engaged in far greater atrocities than Dr. Waldemar Hoven, the man picked by the Nuremberg team as the premier example of death-camp physician. Hoven, chief doctor of Buchenwald, had participated in many selections-but he never conducted medical experiments. Conversely, those doctors on trial for their inhuman use of human “guinea pigs” had not selected victims for the gas chambers.

The Angel of Death of Auschwitz was one of the few Nazi doctors who had both relished selection duty and performed human experiments.

“If they could have gotten hold of Mengele, there is no doubt he would have been tried and sentenced to death,” observed the late John Mendelsohn, a leading authority on the Nuremberg Trials who worked at the National Archives in Washington until his death in 1986.

Mendelsohn believed that Mengele’s case was so outstanding, the sum of his crimes so horrifying, that he should have been tried along with the statesmen and generals before the international military tribunals.

At the doctors’ trial, experts reached all the way back to ancient Greece to find a suitable name to describe the perversions of German science under Hitler. They called it “thanatology,” the science of death, after Thanatos, the Greek spirit who personified death. The proceedings revealed that over two hundred German doctors had been direct participants in “research” crimes, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, more had stood silently by. It was clear that no useful scientific findings had resulted from these experiments—only the suffering and deaths of helpless human beings. At Buchenwald, doctors had searched for a cure for malaria by exposing inmates to the disease-carrying mosquitoes. The prisoners were then “treated” with large doses of questionable drugs, which invariably killed them. At the trial, female witnesses tearfully recalled the brutal sterilization procedures they had undergone at Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.

But oddly enough, no witness or prosecutor mentioned the supreme thanatologist, the Angel of Death, Dr. Mengele. No one mentioned the medical experiments he’d performed on twins, triplets, dwarfs, and giants. The trial never discussed his diabolical tests, castrations, and surgeries. And not a word was said about the active cooperation between Mengele and Professor Verschuer, one of the leading theoretical scientists of the Third Reich.

The answer to this great mystery of why Mengele’s name never surfaced may lie in the sheer immensity of the medical crimes confronted by the Nuremberg prosecutors. According to Neal Slier, director of the U.S. Justice Department’s Nazihunting unit,

“It is a commentary on the barbarity of the Nazis that someone with as much blood on his hands as Mengele would not have been Number One on the prosecutors’ lists. That fact alone should put into perspective the unbelievable scope of the horrors.”

Another Holocaust expert, Dr. Robert Wolfe, director of captured German records at the National Archives, offers a simpler explanation: “He slipped through our fingers.” But in defense of the Nuremberg team, Wolfe argues that “in this chaotic situation, it’s remarkable we caught as many as we did. It’s remarkable we even had a doctors’ trial, because people were getting tired.”