DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (34 page)

Bossert remembered urging him to see a doctor. But Mengele took the friendly advice as an insult. “I know you would be very relieved if I were not around any longer,” he reportedly snapped. But after lunch, Mengele was in a much more cordial mood. The two men even had a good discussion.

According to the Bosserts, that afternoon, while swimming, Josef Mengele suffered a stroke. The water was stormy, and he was only able to move one arm. The Bossert’s son was the first one to notice Mengele was in trouble. “Come back, Uncle,” he cried, “the ocean is pulling you in.” The children watched in horror as their tit io struggled, gasping for breath. Their father tried in vain to revive him, but it was too late. Dr. Mengele was dead.

The Bosserts tried their best to keep the drowning a secret, although the cose attracted some attention on the small Brazilian beach. A lifeguard on the scene became suspicious at the discrepancy between the age of the man on the ID card and the much older corpse in front of him. But the couple who had shielded Mengele so skillfully when he was alive now managed to do so after he had died: Liselotte saved the day by quickly retOrting their friend had suffered from an illness that “made him age remarkably.”

At the beach that evening, the Bosserts say they held an elaborate ceremony in memory of the Angel of Death. There were candles and incense, prayers and hymns chanted under the stars. A wreath of red roses was placed gently on Mengele’s body, while strangers who had gathered on the beach beseeched God to show mercy to the departed.

When I went back to Auschwitz in January 1984, I kept looking for clues-something that would help me understand how my parents had died.

I had a deep need to know what happened.

As I walked through the camp, I finally understood. I saw the path from the railroad tracks to the gas chamber, and I understood how a person could disappear from the face of the earth.

If you take a loved one who dies and bury them in a cemetery, you know you can go back and visit them. But for Miriam and me-for all the Auschwitz twins-there was no cemetery. There was only a memory of that last time we had seen our mother, our father, our sisters.

At Auschwitz, I felt at last I was at their gravesite.

In December 1979, Rolf Mengele says, he returned to Brazil to pay his last respects to the father he had hardly known. It had taken him months to save up money for the air fare. Rolf visited the cemetery in Embu where Mengele was buried under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, whose identity he had adopted four years earlier. Rolf recalled thinking how ironic it was that his father, champion of the Aryan race, lay next to an Oriental in a small, forlorn gravesite.

Much of Rolf’s trip was devoted to tidying up his father’s estate.

The Bosserts and Stammers, who had liquidated most of the property, were anxious to know what to do with the proceeds. The few pieces of furniture, books, and knicknacks the old Nazi had collected were hardly worth very much, and Rolf decided to let them keep the meager amount their sale had brought. In addition, he gave them his dead father’s savings of about a thousand dollars. It was a small thank-you for the years both families had spent harboring the war criminal.

What Rolf cared about most, he later asserted, were the papers his father had left behind-the hundreds of pages of notebooks, diaries, calendars, and letters covered margin-to-margin with Mengele’s tortuous, barely legible script. Rolf returned to Germany anxious to review his father’s writings. In the quiet hours, he pored over them, in search of some special message intended just for him, even a small note addressed “to my son”-but there was none. Mengele’s son also combed the papers for clues to the enigma that was his father. But that search, too, proved to be disappointing. There was far, far less of a personal nature in the papers than he had hoped.

Rolf and other family members say they decided to keep Josefs death a secret, telling only immediate relatives and a handful of intimate friends that the old Auschwitz doctor had drowned on a Brazilian beach.

What were the motives of the Mengele family for keeping the secret of the grave for so many years? Explanations vary. Some have speculated that the family kept silent simply because it did not want to open the Pandora’s box that did in fact open when news of Mengele’s death was finally made public. Rolf Mengele himself insisted that his family merely wanted to protect the many people Germans Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Brazilians, and others who along the way had protected his father over the years.

Life went on for the rest of the Mengeles. The once-lovely Martha retired to Merano, a small town in northern Italy. She never remarried.

She now leads a quiet life, reportedly traveling to Gunzburg only for family gatherings. Even in her old age, there are still traces of her former beauty; she supposedly likes to wear elegant, formfitting gowns that show off her beautiful figure to its best advantage. Intensely private, Martha declines all requests for interviews, and has never publicly discussed her life with Mengele. Her son, Karl Heinz, who is now running the Mengele factory along with his cousin Dieter, is just as silent, just as discreet about his stepfather.

Mengele’s first-and perhaps only-love, Irene Schoenbein, leads a similarly solitary existence in her native Freiburg. She divorced her second husband, Alfons Hackenjos, several years ago, and He has since died. But through the years, she has continued to speak well of Josef, and has admitted to a journalist or two that she had been deeply in love with him as a young girl. If she was ever troubled by his wartime activities, she never publicly revealed her misgivings. A car accident in the 1970s left her incapacitated and nearly homebound.

She keeps to herself, choosing to live in a large, secluded house with a tall gate designed to keep out all nitruders.

Rolf claims he felt strangely relieved after his father’s death. At last, Mengele’s son could begin to lead his OWn life, free of the constant emotional invectives and threats his father had made over the years.

With Dr. Mengele lying in a grave thousands of kilometers away in South America, Rolf could even please and honor him in small ways.

Every blond, blue-eyed child Almuth bore was like a tribute to his father.

But as if on the whim of some prankish god, 1979, the year Mengele’s friends claim he died, was also the year when the public’s interest in finding him was most vigorously renewed. Everyone from professional Nazihunters and Holocaust survivors to members of Congress was suddenly expressing a passionate desire to see Mengele brought to book.

Possibly as a result of the new interest in him, the Auschwitz Angel of Death was now spotted regularly in bustling Latin cities and dense jungles south of the Amazon. He was handsome and dashing as ever, witnesses said, as he shuttled around the triangle border area of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

For years, Simon Wiesenthal and others had been pointing the finger at Paraguay. At around this time, Wiesenthal was joined by a new and dynamic breed of Nazi hunters, led by the husband-and-wife team of Serge and Beale Klarsfeld. Serge, a French Jew, and Beale, a German Gentile, didn’t just stop at condemning the South American dictator who harbored Nazis. They traveled to their countries and waged fiery demonstrations. The Klarsfelds, like Wiesenthal, insisted the regime of General Alfredo Stroessner was harboring the war criminal. As a result of the clamor, Congress joined the fray, urging the State Department to apply pressure on the Paraguayan government.

Stroessner and his deputies had always maintained they knew nothing about Mengele’s whereabouts. But the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, was inclined not to believe a regime that was one of the world’s worst human-rights violators. Convinced that the government that had once granted the Auschwitz doctor citizenship was protecting him still, White was certain that Mengele was living somewhere in the vicinity of Asuncion. He took to wandering alone through the German establishments of the capital in search of information, and sent regular cables to Washington detailing the progress of his “hunt.”

In a surprise move that year, the Paraguayan government caved in to pressure and revoked Mengele’s citizenship-some two decades after granting it to him. It was a gesture clearly intended to appease critics of the Stroessner regime, particularly those in Washington.

That same year, one of the strangest reports ever concerning Mengele arrived by way of the State Department’s secret channels. The embassy in Asuncion had learned, ostensibly from good sources, that Dr. Mengele would be flying to Miami, Florida, on a Delta Airlines flight.

Although information was sketchy, reservations were found to have been made under his name. The bizarre report was taken seriously at the highest levels of the State and Justice Departments, and a major effort was launched to arrest Mengele when he landed. Classified cables flowed back and forth between Washington and Asuncion. The matter even reached the desk of then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. It was Vance who gave the orders to arrest Mengele when he arrived in Miami.

But, of course, Josef Mengele never boarded the Delta flight. FBI agents who were poised to nab him at the Miami airport returned, empty-handed and disappointed, to their headquarters. They subsequently filed a report dismissing the incident as a probable hoax.

But no one was ever able to explain the mysterious reservations made under Mengele’s name.

“If I could get this man, then my soul would finally be at peace,”

Simon Wiesenthal liked to tell friends and colleagues. He continued to tantalize the world with fantastic tales of the Auschwitz doctor. One day, Mengele would be spotted in a Mennonite community, deep in the heart of Paraguay. The next, he was in Bolivia, fraternizing with Klaus Barbie; the Angel of Death and the Butcher of Lyons were rumored to be on excellent terms. A priest spotted him on the Brazilian border. A Holocaust survivor swore she had seen Mengele shopping in her store in downtown Asuncion. Uruguay had asked him to train its police force. Stroessner had summoned him for expert medical advice.

The CIA had reports he was involved in the international narcotics trade. He was rumored to be best friends with another missing Nazi, Martin Bormann. He was dying of cancer. He had just had a face-lift.

He looked haggard and worn out from his years on the run.

Mengele was seen here and there, everywhere and nowhere. The more Wiesenthal floated reports about Mengele’s supposed whereabouts, the more elusive the Angel of Death seemed to be.

The 1980s brought a resurgence of interest in the Holocaust. In 1983, the first national conference for survivors in Washington attracted some fifteen thousand victims of Hitler’s death camps. They gathered to search for loved ones and friends and relive the horror.

Many spoke for the first time about their experiences. They crowded around specially installed computer banks crammed with names of survivors hoping to find a longlost relative. The historic three-day reunion prompted an appearance by President Ronald Reagan, who made a moving speech about America’s responsibility to remember the Nazi slaughter of the Jews.

Attending the gathering was Mengele’s child-victim Alex Dekel, who was in Washington to lobby members of Congress about Mengele.

Obsessed with finding the war criminal, Dekel wanted the United States Congress to pressure Paraguay to turn over Mengele. But within weeks of the gathering, Alex died-and with him, it seemed, any resolve to capture the missing death-camp doctor.

But the following year, Eva Mores, a surviving twin who had also been in Washington, earnestly took up Alex’s cause. She and her sister, Miriam, decided it was time the world should learn the story of the Auschwitz children. From her home in Terre Haute, Indiana, Eva sent letters to five hundred prominent American journalists and newspapers, urging them to write about the missing Auschwitz doctor and his child-victims, the twins. For months, she waited for a reply to her anxious requests. One day, her photocopied letter reached the desk of nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Anderson received thousands of letters a week, and often turned them over to his team of investigative reporters. Struck by the poignancy of Eva’s letter, Anderson associate Lucette Lagnado decided to contact the Indiana housewife. In the course of several emotional phone conversations, Eva told Lagnado of her childhood experiences as a surgical guinea pig, the brutal loss of her parents and sisters in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and life with Dr. Mengele.

EVA MOZES: Over the years, I had had so many nightmares about Auschwitz. I was always thinking about Mengele, about the camp, about the other twins.

I had read many of the books about Auschwitz, but to my great sorrow they never mentioned Mengele and the twins, except in passing.

I had a very personal need to search for the twins. I wanted to understand what had been done to Miriam and me-to know why she was ill so often, why I had so many problems.

I thought that maybe if I could locate the twins, we could sit down and piece together what had happened to us in the concentration camp.

And then one day, it occurred to me that there was one person who knew exactly what was done to us-Dr. Mengele. I found out that Mengele had been free since the end of the war.

I thought,

“That is impossible.”

In Israel, Eva’s sister, Miriam, was equally intent on locating other twins. With the help of a relative who worked at Ma’Ariv, one of Israel’s leading dailies, Miriam placed a small ad asking any child survivors of Mengele’s experiments to contact her. Within days, she was flooded with calls and letters from twins longing to see each other again. A reunion was quickly arranged.

HEDvAH STERN: I had been waiting for this moment-for someone to bring up what had happened. The wound was there, and it reopened.

LEAN STERN: I kept crying-shouting and crying. “Why, why, why didn’t anyone do this before?” I blamed the world for the fact that no one had ever taken notice of us.

MOSHE OFFER: There were so many of us still around-some had been hurt less, some were hurt more. I went to the reunion thinking that all the twins who underwent experiments at Mengele’s hands were suffering. And their children were suffering. And they would suffer for generations to come.