DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (37 page)

And when the doctors declared that Miriam could only be saved if she received a new kidney, Eva unhesitatingly volunteered her own.

Dozens of Mengele’s twins dropped by to visit them before the surgery.

The Mores sisters, alive and well with one kidney each, just turned fifty-five.

JUDITH YAGUDAIl After years of financial struggle, Judith is the only one among Mengele’s twins believed to be a millionaire. She lives with her husband in a splendid mansion in Tel Aviv’s most elegant suburb of Savyon. She is still very close to her mother. Although the two don’t live in the same house anymore, they get together often and reminisce about Ruthie, and life before the war. Her mother no longer complains about Judith’s choice of a husband. Judith recently turned fifty-six.

PETER SOMOGYL Peter lives in Pleasantville, New York, in affluent Westchester County, where he has opened a successful appliance business. He and his wife have two children, a boy and a girl. He is fifty seven years old.

LEA AND MENASHE RIN Lea Lorinezi, now Lea Cluck, runs two flourishing ladies’ garment stores in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

She and her husband are devoutly religious hassidic Jews, and live in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. They have two children and several grandchildren. Menashe, her twin, lives with his wife Yaffah in Netanya, where they spend most of their time caring for their three children and six grandchildren. The Lorinczi twins are fifty-six years old.

VERA GROSSMAN Vera is the gypsy among Mengele’s children. At fifty-two, she can be found wandering around Europe, the United States, and Israel. A popular figure on the lecture circuit, she is also devoted to her daughter, Irit, her son, and her three grandchildren.

And she makes frequent trips to Haifa to look after her twin, Olga.

O GROSSMAN Olga is slowly finding in middle age the peace of mind that eluded her in her youth. She has recovered sufficiently from her depression to stop seeing Dr. Stern and resume a normal life. She is still happily married to her army colonel, and together they live in a sun-drenched apartment high on the hills of Haifa. They have two children. Olga is excited about the prospect of becoming a grandmother; she hopes it will be less painful than being a mother.

EVAKUPAS Eva is a housewife and mother, living in Tel Aviv. She is intensely private about her life, and discloses few personal details.

VERA BLAU Vera, fifty-six, has become an artist in Tel Aviv. Vera’s art instructor is persuaded that his lively, sensitive student could add a great deal to the existing body of art on the Holocaust. He urges her to paint scenes from the concentration camp. But this veteran of Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and Bergen-Belsen has no desire to recapture the past: She looks to the present for subjects she can paint. Her canvasses are bright and colorful, depicting joyous scenes of everyday life. Her paintings are sunny and cheerful, and that is perhaps not as improbable as it seems. They were painted, after all, by the grownup little girl who still believes, in spite of everything she has seen and heard, that Dr. Josef Mengele loved children.

DR. JOSEF MENGELE In his life, the Auschwitz doctor wandered far afield from his native Germany. He journeyed to Poland, to Russia, to Yugoslavia, to Austria, to Italy, to Argentina, to Switzerland, to Paraguay, to Uruguay, and finally to Brazil. His wanderings have not ceased. His alleged skeletal remains were at last returned to the Fatherland in 1989. But still the bones keep moving. And in 1990, forty-five years after the Liberation, the Allies finally got their hands on the Angel of Death. After a lifetime on the move, he has made another voyage, this time to England. The bones alleged to be his were recently shipped across the Channel to the University of Leicester, for forensic and pathological testing performed by yet another medical expert.

Somehow, it is hard to imagine that the story will end there in the British Isles.

As with everything else concerning Dr. Mengele, the analysis is proving difficult, the results, elusive.

the end.