DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (22 page)

But in Israel, I didn’t have the money to study medicine-so I became a nurse instead.

I was offered free room and board in the hospital. I paid nothing for my training.

EVA MOrEs: We were separated for the first time at boot camp. Miriam went to the hospital to train to become a nurse. I was sent to work as a secretary.

The Israeli government had decided it would not train women to be draftsmen because they would get married and leave their jobs.

Instead, I was only trained to type.

I worked in an office in Tel Aviv. Miriam lived with other nurses at her hospital. It was traumatic. We had never been apart before.

MIRIAM MOZES: It was very hard to live apart from Eva. From Auschwitz until then, I had always had my sister at my side. She took care of me. She was like my mother.

I cried all the time at first. It took a year before I got used to being on my own. I made friends among the nurses. During holidays, Eva came to visit me. We tried to see each other at least once a week.

When I finished my studies, I went to the director of the hospital and told him I wanted to share a room with my twin sister. I told him I had no parents or brothers or sisters except her-she was my only surviving relative. He agreed to let Eva move into the hospital dormitory.

Mengele began corresponding with his family in Gunzburg, as well as with his six-year-old son. Irene had finally left the Gunzburg area and returned to her beloved Freiburg, taking little Rolf with her.

In 1948, she had become friendly with a businessman from Freiburg, Alfons Hackenjos, and the two fell in love. The romantic entanglement was not unexpected: Irene was tired of the war-widow’s life.

Hackenjos, a prosperous shoe-store owner, offered her the companionship and stability she craved.

Though Mengele’s relationship with Irene was over, he had every intention of keeping up with his ony child. Mengele’s letters to Rolf, who was growing up into an appealing and bright little boy, were always signed

“Uncle Fritz.” The child had been told early on that his father had died in the Russian Campaign-Rolf had no idea Mengele was alive, let alone that he was one and the same with

“Uncle Fritz.” The letters make clear that Mengele had lost none of his old flair for captivating small children. He spun colorful tales of gauchos, the South American cowboys, recounting their exploits in raising cattle on the pampas. Sometimes there were amusing drawings, or perhaps a poem or a song composed especially for Rolf. Each time, there was a big stamp, often with the photograph of Evita Peron, that Rolf could add to his burgeoning collection. Argentina assumed mythical proportions in the mind of Mengele’s child. It seemed considerably more interesting than his own humdrum Black Forest town. In Argentina, men who were larger than life daily tried to tame the wild beasts that roamed the pampas. And reigning over this magical kingdom were two people-the lovely blond woman of the stamps and his own handsome uncle Fritz. The little boy waited expectantly for the letters from the amusing, glamorous uncle he thought he had never met, who lavished such intense affection on him-nearly enough to make up for the father he had never known.

VERA GROSSMAN: Parents started coming to Ireland within a few months of our arrival to reclaim their children. Many families were able to obtain visas to emigrate from Eastern Europe to Canada and the United States, and they would stop in Ireland to pick up their daughters. Our group in the castle dwindled to less than twenty girls.

Our own mother and stepfather left Eastern Europe for Israel.

After we had gained sufficient strength, Olga and I and the remaining girls were moved from Ireland to London. We were placed in the house of a rabbi and his wife, who had several children of their own. They owned a large fourteen-room mansion and could take in a lot of us. We attended Avigdor High School, a Jewish school run by Rabbi Schoenfeld, the man who had plucked us out of our homes in Eastern Europe.

School was wonderful, but the family we lived with was cruel to us. They had been paid to take us and the other children in. But they treated us like servants.

Both my sister and I missed our mother very much. And I think the pain of the separation started to show-especially on Olga. Even in Ireland, where we were very well treated, she had begun acting strangely. She talked about people trying to hypnotize her.

We tried our best to keep up the correspondence with our mother.

But it was difficult, because as we were becoming more proficient in English, we were forgetting how to speak Czech.

OLGA GROSSMAN: Because our mother couldn’t speak English, we had to write letters to her in Czech. It would take us five hours to compose a single letter.

I remember going to London’s West End one day with Vera to purchase a Czech-English dictionary. We wrote our letters word by word. We had both forgotten our native language. We understood it, but we couldn’t speak it or write it.

Still, it was very important for us to correspond with our mother.

Mengele faithfully kept up a correspondence with the rest of the family, which was still mourning the untimely death of Karl Jr. in 1949 at the age of thirty-seven, after an illness. Josef’s father and Lolo were now running the firm, with the loyal Sedlmeier acting as their right-hand man. Mengele was clearly still loved and remembered by his relatives in Gunzburg. They helped him financially as much as they could-his father even sent him some expensive farm machinery to start a business. Josef began selling the equipment, traveling to neighboring Paraguay, where there was a lucrative market. He also invested some of his father’s money in a small carpentry business of his own, which flourished as well.

In the tightly knit German community of Buenos Aires, it was not hard for Mengele to meet people and establish his impeccable social -and Nazi-credentials. It was known that he came from a wealthy family in Bavaria that was continuing to supply him with money.

Several people knew, and admired, his status as a wanted war criminal who had been a scientist and doctor in the Third Reich. Within a couple of years after his penniless arrival, he was mingling with the expatriate Nazi society and meeting important war criminals like himself.

One of these was Wilhelm Sassens, a Nazi wanted for war crimes in Belgium, who was a journalist for Nazi publications in Argentina.

It was Sassens who introduced Mengele to the man who was to become his best friend in exile, Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel. The World War II flying ace, who had been the most decorated member of the Luftwaffe, as well as Hitler’s personal pilot, was a devotee of Hitler’s ideology long after the war’s end. He was also a close friend of Juan Peron, and had helped build up the Argentine Air Force using his expertise gleaned from the war years. Through Rudel, Mengele was finally able to join the elite clique of Germans who enjoyed the confidence of the Latin dictator.

Mengele was predictably drawn to these men, who were, like himself, unrepentant Nazis. Like the old Bourbon kings who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, they mourned the fall of Hitler and the Third Reich. The specter of a defeated Germany, disgraced in the world, had not dissuaded them from their faith in the righteousness and fundamental superiority of the German people.

During World War II, Argentina had been a center of Nazi activity, giving rise to Allied fears that the Germans might use the country as a base to expand their power to the Western Hemisphere. Indeed, since their settlement in Argentina in the previous century, the Germans had always believed they were biologically and culturally superior to the native population. According to Ronald Newton, a historian who has studied German culture in Argentina, the Germans felt “a communal conviction of superiority to the surrounding culture.” The large, solidly entrenched populace was an ideal target for Nazi prod aganda; Hitlerian notions of law, order, tradition, and respect for authority appealed to the German expatriates.

Pro-Nazi publications flourished in South America long after the the defeat of the German Army. One of them, the virulently antisemitic Der Weg, or

“The Way,” was popular in the early 1950s.

Sassens was a regular contributor. In 1953, an article appeared in Der Weg that dealt with genetics; it was by lined

“G. Helmuth,” a transposition of Josef Mengele?s alias,

“Helmut Gregor.” Three years after arriving in Argentina, Mengele still felt vulnerable enough to use a pseudonym of his pseudonym.

The article itself was not remarkable. Intended for the layman, it explained basic principles of genetics, although Rassenhygien-racial science-was not mentioned. In fact, it contained no hint of racism, fanaticism, or politics. However, even at the height of the Nazi era, Mengele’s published articles had been distinguished by their lack of rhetoric. But because it appeared in the Nazi organ Der Weg, Mengele’s sober, apolitical piece was, by definition, pro-Nazi.

On the other side of the world, Verschuer was far ahead of his old pupil. He had mastered the scientific lingo of the postwar establishment to perfection and was flourishing. After maintaining a low profile for several years following the 1946 newspaper revelations of his scandalous past, Verschuer had finally obtained an appointment at the University of Munster in 1951. Mengele’s mentor was now lecturing before packed classrooms at the university.

VERA GROSSMAN: Olga began to constantly black out in class. Whenever a teacher asked her a question, she would get panic-stricken and faint.

I managed a little better. I worked very hard. Teachers were always holding up my notebooks and praising me for my neat penmanship. I won a handwriting competition two years in a row.

One day, a geography teacher I liked made n of one of my notebooks.

I’m not sure what was wrong, but he held it up in class and ridiculed it. Some of the other children started laughing.

I got up from my chair and started running out of the classroom.

I remember running, running out of school. I was crying hysterically.

I ran for miles until I got to a park, and I sat there, under a tree, crying.

A search party from the school found me there. The geography teacher came-he apologized to me.

I think it was the first time I cried. I cried my heart out. I cried for all the years I didn’t cry.

The next day, I went back to school. I felt better than before. From then on, I cried more often, and much more naturally. I didn’t keep things bottled up inside of me as much.

But Olga had more and more trouble in class. It was very humiliating to her, not to be able to answer the teachers. She was always so weak and pale, so timid. My heart broke for her.

Once installed at Monster, Verschuer set about building the largest institute for genetic studies in West Germany. With each passing year, he felt less cautious about the need for circumspection, and his old ambition led him to push for recognition from his peers. Verschuer was careful to omit any overt reference to racial science from his lectures or publications. In the classroom, he focused on geneticsa field that was eminently respectable.

But Verschuer wasn’t entirely discreet. He served for many years on the international editorial board of the Mankind Quarterly, a racist and antiSemitic publication based in Washington, D.C founded in 1960 by anthropologists who admired the fundamental precepts of Nazi racial science. Verschuer also helped other former colleagues from the Frankfurt Institute attain positions in the mainstream scientific community. His former deputy, Heinrich Schade, taught genetics at the University of Dusseldorf, and also rose in the academic world, although he never attained the status of Verschuer. A die-hard racial scientist long after the fall of the Third Reich, Schade insisted on the need to create a master race of Aryans by getting rid of “inferior” genetic stock.

Schade became an adviser and source of inspiration to neo-Nazi movements. Despite these unseemly affiliations, he was respected among colleagues in academia. He and Verschuer were on the best of terms.

The horror of it all was that postwar Germany embraced both Verschuer and Schade with open arms. That one had become relatively discreet, purposefully keeping the lid on his racial theories, while the other remained a flagrant and unabashed preacher on the supremacy of Aryan genetic science, did not matter. The fact that they both thrived is one of the most telling points about the culture. One could soft pedal one’s racial views and publish them only in the obscurity of the Mankind Quarterly, a continent away, as Verschuer did, or one could trumpet them from the tallest ivy tower on the campus of the University of Dusseldorf, as Schade did. And still, postwar Germany, which could not have had any illusions about these racial theorists, allowed them to prosper. The point was, it did not matter.

One can imagine the burning envy Mengele must have felt at seeing his old colleagues, one by one, attain the positions he craved.

According to Hans Sedlmeier, Mengele made a secret visit to West Germany in the early 1950s and made a side trip to see Verschuer.

Perhaps Mengele hoped that his old mentor, who had placed many of his former colleagues in prestigious positions, could do the same for him.

There is indeed evidence that even while Mengele was at the Fischer farm in the years immediately following the war, Verschuer tried to get him a university job but was unable to do so because of the furor surrounding his pupil’s name.

If, in fact, Mengele and Verschuer renewed their ties with one another, they did so with utmost secrecy. Verschuer’s son, Helmut, claimed that his father never once mentioned the notorious young man who had been his protege for so many years. Mengele also saw a need to protect his old professor: Among the hundreds of letters Mengele left behind at his death that were later released by his son, not one mentions Verschuer.

Aside from the occasional pang of homesickness, Mengele could not complain of his life in Argentina. Although he never penetrated the scientific establishment or practiced medicine again-legally-he did well as a businessman. (There are hints and suggestions he performed illegal abortions while in Argentina, but few details are available.) The sales of Mengele farm equipment, his carpentry workshop, and a generous allowance from his father helped him to lead an increasingly comfortable life. The Nuremberg prosecutors had long since returned home to New York and Washington; several used their prestigious Nazihunting credentials to establish lucrative private law practices.