DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (4 page)

World War I was the turning point for the Mengeles’ fortunes.

The family received lucrative contracts to manufacture military goods and was busy turning out army vehicles and other weaponry. At the end of the war, once again in the farm-equipment business, the Mengele plant was among the largest in Gunzburg. By 1918, the Mengeles were rich enough to move to a home of their own. Karl and his wife picked a lovely villa across the street from the Gymnasium the boys would attend.

VERA GROSSMAN: I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1938 to a very wealthy family. My father, who was twenty years older than my mother, owned many fields and plantations. More than two hundred laborers worked for him, tilling the soil and helping to pick and package the fruits and vegetables.

He fell in love with my mother when she was just a young girl.

Before the war, Mother was extremely beautiful. She had jet-black hair and blue eyes.

When they married, he brought her to live on his estate and lavished her with clothes, servants, jewels. All her dresses were hand-made in Prague.

Once, a dress she had ordered for a wedding didn’t arrive on time.

My father sent his chauffeur all the way to Prague-hundreds of kilometers away-to fetch it.

My father was delighted when Olga and I were born. At his age, he considered twins a double blessing. We were spoiled and given everything children could want.

Of course, this lifestyle came to an and when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia. Jews could no longer live openly. Even though my father was very rich, and had connections with the government we still had to go into hiding. We had to abandon everything.

First, my father bribed a Christian family to let us live in their attic. It was a terrifying period. I was only four years old, but I remember how we were constantly admonished not to make any noise. Even to cry was forbidden, because it would endanger the family.

And to this day, I am haunted by this feeling-that if I do something wrong, my whole family will die.

Eventually, it became so dangerous to hide Jews in Czechoslovakia that no one wanted to shelter us-no matter what my father was willing to pay. We lived like animals, lying low during the day, foraging for food at night. I can recall eating raw potatoes, when that was all my parents could find.

But eventually the Germans found us there. We were sent to a series of concentration camps, until we arrived finally at Auschwitz, in the spring of 1944.

To outsiders, the Mengeles seemed a close, devoted family. A devout Catholic, Walburga raised her sons to be regular churchgoers.

Old family albums show Josef dressed as an altar boy, the picture of innocence and piety. Dressed in their Sunday best, father, mother, and the three children went each week to the beautiful eighteenthcentury church near the old marketplace. They were a handsome family and, as their wealth increased, the cause of some fascination in the town.

Neighbors recall how Josef, Karl Heinz, and Lolo shared friends, romped about the fields, and went on frequent outings with their parents. A few older residents can still remember the skating parties Karl and Walburga held for the children on a small pond near their house. They served delicious candied apples, while music from a wind-up gramophone played in the frosty air.

The Mengele boys were always the object of much fawning, especially Josef. He was a docile child, and eager to please; Walburga had made sure of that. But though he acted like an angel, he looked more like a young Gypsy. In fact, some who knew him then had the distinct feeling that at any moment this obedient little boy would make a run for it, defying his parents as other normal children did.

Mengele never broke loose, however. His early school records show he was a model child, who impressed his teachers with his exceptionally good behavior. Though a mediocre student, he still managed to receive A’s in conduct and diligence throughout his elementary and high school years. Even in the strict Prussian atmosphere of a prewar Gymnasium, teachers went out of their way to praise the perfect conduct of Beppo Mengele.

ALEX DEKEL: I could hear the blaring music of Lohengrin being piped through loudspeakers as I walked through the gates of Auschwitz It was like entering the inferno.

I was thirteen years old when my mother and I were deported to the death camp from our hometown of Cluj, in Transylvania.

In early March 1944, my mother had received word that we were being sent to a work camp in central Hungary, supposedly to help with the war effort.

We were afraid, but the hope of living, of going only to a labor camp, kept us going.

The deportations were organized alphabetically, and since our last initial was D we were the first to be called to board the train.

After two horrible days aboard this train, I knew we had gone far beyond the borders of Hungary, and were destined either for Germany or Poland. Panic reigned in the cars. Two people committed suicide.

My mother clutched me to her and covered my ears with her hands.

When the train finally stopped, the Germans ordered everyone to get out. I smelled a faint burning odor. A sign along the tracks read

BIRKENAU.

Dr. Mengele was standing at the head of the selection line. He noticed me immediately because I didn’t look Jewish. I had very blond hair, and blue eyes, and I was in excellent physical shape. When he started talking to me, I answered him in fluent German.

Mengele wasn’t only looking for twins-he wanted triplets, midgets, hunchbacks, any unusual types. Even people like me-Jews who looked like perfect Aryans. He asked me to step out of the line. I looked around for my mother, but she had disappeared.

I prayed that she was among a group of women who had been selected to live.

Mengele’s mother was the archetypal German hausfrau whose life revolved around her children. Photographs show a heavyset woman with a stern, homely face and dark, scowling eyes. Unlike her husband, who adopted an aristocratic demeanor with his growing wealth, Walburga made no attempt to alter her dowdy and matronly appearance.

In the fashion of older peasant women, she dressed almost entirely in black.

“Wally” Mengele suffered from a terrible weight problem, which stemmed from her lone indulgence: food. She simply loved to eat.

One Gunzburg woman who knew her well, now relocated to New York’s affluent Westchester County, spins story after story about this impassioned craving. Mrs. Mengele’s favorite pastime, she recalls, was the afternoon kaffee klatsch, the get-tog ethers with women friends over coffee and pastry. Over the years, Walburga grew enormous. She ate constantly, compulsively. She became so obese, she could hardly walk.

She was so massive, she looked almost pregnant. She was so hungry she devoured everything in sight.

There was a troubling, terrifying side to Mengele’s mother that only a few people saw, such as the workers at her husband’s factory.

Dr. Zdenek Zofka, the unofficial historian of Gunzburg, says the employees fretted whenever Wally came to visit. She had no compunctions about yelling at them and embarrassing them before the others, according to Zofka, and was inclined to fly into rages at the slightest provocation. They nicknamed her “the Matador,” and instinctively stayed out of her way. Once, she screamed at some female employees for not having washed the factory’s curtains. When they argued it was not their job, she continued to scold and threaten them, thereby earning their lifelong enmity. Over forty years after her death, old Mengele factory workers still harbor bitter feelings toward the indomitable Walburga Mengele.

Mengele’s mother was larger than life, and she loomed as a gigantic figure in Josefs life-impossible to escape, equally impossible to please. She could be warm and maternal, or she could behave like a raging bull. Her reactions were impossible to predict. In an unpublished autobiography he wrote many years after the war, Mengele recounted a day when his father came home with a wonderful surprise for the family: a new automobile. The three boys were overjoyed. Karl invited his wife to come out and join them for a ride. But Walburga was livid. How dare he indulge in such a large purchase-such an extravagance-without her approval? Karl tried to soothe her, to no avail, and finally exploded and threatened to leave her. According to his account, Josef listened, petrified, to his parents’ quarrel. After his father had left the room, the little boy went over to comfort his mother.

“I will always stay with you,” he told her.

HEDVAH AND LFAH STERN: When they opened the door to our cattle car, our mother became very frightened. “Stay with me, children,” she told us, refusing to let go of our hands.

But then some prisoners told her in Yiddish,

“Tell them you have twins.

There is a Dr. Mengele here who wants twins. Only twins are being kept alive.”

But our mother didn’t want to be separated from us. She said,

“No, you are coming with me,” and continued walking toward the crematorium.

We were thirteen-and-a-half years old when our family was sent to Auschwitz from our small town in Hungary. There were a lot of Jews living in that town before the war.

Our mother was a widow. Father died when we were only six years old, and mother never remarried. She decided to raise us by herself because she feared that a second husband might mistreat us.

We were very close to our mother. She was a seamstress, and after our father died, she had to work hard to support us. Yet she never let us feel like orphans. She gave us whatever we wanted. We lacked for nothing.

We adored her. We fought with each other to get her attention. We dreamt of the day we would be old enough to work and help her.

We hoped to open up our own seamstress shop. Whatever we earned, we planned to give it to our mother. We wanted to call it

“The Stern Sisters.”

At Auschwitz, mother was determined to hold on to us. She hid us under her skirt.

Josef was the one person who was able to pierce his mother’s stern facade and elicit a smile and a little warmth. Mengele’s writings about his childhood suggest that from the start, he was his mother’s son, loyally siding with her, whatever the issue. He seems to have preferred his temperamental mother to his father, whose life revolved around the factory. Although Mengele patterned himself in dress and demeanor after Karl, his love was reserved for Walburga. Twice married, he never lived with any woman for any length of time. Also twice separated, he had relationships marred by estrangements and disaffection. He could not form a deep attachment, even to the mother of his child.

When he was fifteen years old, Mengele became ill with osteomylitis, a disease of the bone marrow that was almost always fatal in those days.

He also developed two ailments that were probably related to the osteomylitis: nephritis, a painful inflammation of the kidneys, and a severe systemic infection. Because of his illness, he was out of school between six and nine months. His grades, never very good, suffered a dramatic decline. It was a struggle simply to keep up with his classmates and not be left back. He failed several subjects, prompting one teacher to observe on his report card that Josef “must become more diligent, more studious, and more ambitious.”

Outside the confines of the dreary Gymnasium, Mengele fared much better. His social skills were far more impressive than his intellectual prowess. To his friends and schoolmates, young Josef was charming and articulate-a natural leader. The handsome, debonair Beppo was in his element in Gunzburg’s chic cale society and salons.

Mengele and his youngest brother, Lolo, ran with an elite, affluent crowd of young men and girls who were pretty and flirtatious without being loose. Josef and his friends dressed impeccably, soon drove their own cars, and never left home without the requisite hat and white gloves. They didn’t actually wear the gloves, but only held them, nonchalantly, in one hand.

It is ironic that years later, in his autobiography, Mengele conjured a picture of himself as a solitary, self-effacing youth. In his own eyes, he was an exceptionally virtuous young man, serious and committed, with few interests other than his studies and political youth groups.

He depicted himself as monk like and ascetic, different from other young men his age.

But Mengele’s vision of his past was, in fact, an excellent description of his lonely existence during the period he penned his manuscript, when he was already in his sixties. He was merely projecting what his mother had wanted him to be-austere, chaste, self denying-whereas his actual nature tended toward luxury and self-indulgence. Like his father, he preferred the finer things in life.

At balls, which were held throughout the year at the homes of his wealthy friends, Beppo Mengele was one of the most sought-after dance partners. He was extremely handsome, with classic features and a slight enigmatic smile. Most striking were his eyes, which were wide and thoughtful and varicolored. Josef was certainly conscious of his good looks, though he wished he were taller. Like his father, he took great pains to appear the picture of elegance. His suits were always of the most expensive fabrics, tailored in the most flattering cut.

Yet acquaintances remember he managed to seem as though he hardly spent a moment on his appearance. Young Mengele possessed a grace, mingled with nonchalance, which the Italian Renaissance princes had dubbed sprezzaturo-the art of going through life looking as if whatever you did came effortlessly.

SOLOMON MALIK: Dr. Mengele made an immediate impression. He was very handsome, very nicely dressed.

When my family arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944 from Romania, we heard Mengele asking for twins. There were two sets of twins in the family-my sister and I and our two younger brothers. But we didn’t want to admit we were all twins. We did not know what was going to happen.

Then, another family who knew us pointed us out to Mengele, telling him,

“There are some twins!” And so Mengele took the four of us away, along with our mother.

EVA KUPAS: He was so nice-looking. .

We arrived in Auschwitz in the spring of 1944.