DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (6 page)

All the Jews of the Gluj Ghetto readily boarded the transports. We had no idea we were going to an extermination camp. No one in our town knew.

Our local Jewish Council-the Judenrat -had made a secret pact with the Germans. The council had arranged for the Nazis to send us postcards from other Jews who had been deported to the death camps.

In these postcards, people we had known wrote that they were fine.

They said they had been taken to some labor camps in Hungary, and were working.

And so my father had no idea what Auschwitz was when we arrived.

But when we got out of the cattle car, and he saw the dogs, and the Nazis in uniform, and the flames billowing out from the crematorium, he guessed.

We were immediately separated from our father Ruthie and I went with our mother to one line just for women and children.

There was Mengele, standing at the head of the line.

He was telling people where to go, in what direction-to the right or to the left, to work or to the gas chambers.

When it was our turn, Mengele immediately asked us if we were twins.

Ruthie and I looked identical. We had similar hairdos. We were wearing the same outfits.

Mengele ordered us to go in a certain direction-and our mother, too.

With his medical training and Ph. D. in anthropology, Mengele was well-prepared to excel at the Frankfurt Institute. His job as an assistant to Verschuer marked his formal initiation into the world of Nazi racial medicine. He quickly rose to become Verschuer’s most trusted young disciple, and they often collaborated on important projects. Verschuer clearly saw potential in the malleable young man who was not only hardworking and determined, but whose ideas were also politically congenial to Verschuer’s own. Under his aegis, Mengele learned that it was acceptable-even desirable-to experiment on human beings if it advanced a scientific cause. The professor provided the critical link in Mengele’s transformation from an ambitious young scientist into a camp doctor who sent Jews to their deaths and performed grotesque experiments on children.

Indeed, the obsession with twins that Mengele would later exhibit at Auschwitz was also a direct result of his association with Verschuer.

In the 1920s, when Verschuer had been head of the genetics department at Berlin’s Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, the leading research center in Germany, his work had focused almost exclusively on twins. Mengele’s mentor was convinced that twins held the key to unlocking the mysteries of genetics. He wrote in one textbook that experimenting on twins would enable scientists to make “a reliable determination of what is hereditary in man.” Verschuer, however, is not known to have conducted any so-called

“In vivo experiments on living twins. He restrained himself either because of long-standing rules forbidding the use of human guinea pigs that traditionally bound the scientific community, or because of his own devoutly Catholic upbringing. Until the war removed such protocols, his work, instead, like that of so many other researchers on twins, was based on observation and patient comparisons.

Verschuer did, however, instill in his young assistant his confidence of how useful twins’ studies, including “in vivo” research, could be.

EVA MOZES: During the journey to Auschwitz, our father had gathered the family near him in a corner of the cattle car. “Promise me that if any of you survive this terrible war, you will go to Palestine,” he told us.

We arrived at Auschwitz in the early spring of 1944. There were six of us: my mother and my father, my older sisters, Edith and Alice, and me and my twin, Miriam.

My father, Alexander Mores, was a very religious man. He opened his prayer book and began to pray-right there, in the crowded cattle car.

But since Jews have to pray facing east, he had to pause for a moment to figure out in which direction he should turn.

He opened his prayer book and began calmly to read amid the cries of hungry children and their terrified parents. A few others in our car joined him in the recitation of the Shema, the ritual Hebrew morning prayer.

When the doors to our cattle car opened, I heard SS soldiers yelling, “Schnell! Schnelll” (“Faster! Faster!”), and ordering everybody out.

My mother grabbed Miriam and me by the hand. She was always trying to protect us because we were the youngest.

Everything was moving very fast, and as I looked around, I noticed my father and my two older sisters were gone.

As I clutched my mother’s hand, an SS man hurried by shouting, “Twins!

Twins!” He stopped to look at us. Miriam and I looked very much alike. We were wearing similar clothes.

“Are they twins?” he asked my mother. “Is that good?” she replied.

He nodded yes.

“They are twins,” she said.

L A LORINCzI: My twin brother, Menashe, and I were vacationing with our grandparents in Transylvania when the Germans came in March 1944. My grandparents tried to send us home to our mother in Cluj. But we were not permitted to travel.

The police rounded us up and placed us in a ghetto. Menashe and I celebrated our tenth birthday inside this ghetto. As a birthday present, our grandmother gave each of us one slice of bread.

From the ghetto, we were all placed in cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz. When we got off the trains, we could hear the Germans yelling,

“Twins, twins!”

My grandmother naively believed our mother was there, and had instructed the guards to be “on the lookout” for us. She thought that was why they were calling for twins.

And so Grandmother pushed us out of the line going to the gas chamber and said,

“You are going to your mother.” She thrust into our hands a toothbrush and toothpaste.

As Mengele was absorbing Verschuer’s values, he was also working extremely hard to please his mentor. As a result of his diligence, Mengele became not only a special pet of Verschuer at work but also a frequent guest at the director’s residence, where he often stayed for dinner.

There were personal factors that strengthened the bond between the young would-be scientist and the dean of Nazi racial hygiene.

Mengele was far from home, and deeply in need of a parental figure to give him support. While in Gunzburg, Mengele had suffered from his father’s self-absorption, the fact that he was more involved in his factory than with his sons. Mengele was naturally drawn to Otmar von Verschuer, who was a personable, fatherly man with several children of his own, as well as a brilliant scientist. In establishing a close tie with Verschuer, Mengele found both the paternal attention he longed for and reaffirmation of his own talents.

In many ways, the impressionable Mengele was an ideal protege for the opportunistic Verschuer. The professor could and did channel Mengele’s zeal to distinguish himself to advance the institute and, in turn, the cause of the Nazis. Mengele’s mixture of intense vanity and insecurity made him ripe for manipulation. Young Mengele would be groomed to be a “biological soldier” who would obey Verschuer’s orders in the laboratory as completely as a soldier in the battlefield.

While Mengele toiled away in the laboratory, his politically savvy mentor was spending time currying favor with Germany’s new rulers.

Verschuer, who was in constant communication with the Nazi hierarchy, paid frequent tribute to Hitler in his various publications. His articles routinely praised the Fuhrer, damned the Jews, and called for ever more drastic measures to eliminate them from German society.

Verschuer’s antiSemitic rhetoric grew more vivid with the increasing power of the Nazi regime.

Ultimately, Verschuer helped give the Final Solution-the plan to kill all the Jews of Europe-intellectual respectability. Although he never held high office in the Reich, his published opinions carried considerable weight. The Nazis relied on him to offer scientific rationales for their more brutal actions. Not coincidentally, the more he endorsed the Nazi line, the greater became his prestige and influence.

As a perceptive American investigator at the Nuremberg trials later observed, Verschuer “sacrificed his pure scientific knowledge in order to secure for himself the applause and the favor of the Nazi tyrants.”

By 1938, Mengele was beginning to enjoy considerable professional success and recognition. He had just completed and published his second doctoral dissertation, which was along similar lines of his earlier Munich treatise, a study of the general area of the human jaw.

This new thesis clearly reflected Verschuer’s influence. While the earlier paper had been primarily a factual study, Mengele now began to formulate theories on the “racial origins” of hereditary traits such as the cleft palate and the harelip.

Mengele’s personal life, once limited to group outings and casual flirtations, was also flourishing. That same year he became engaged to Irene Schoenbein, a lovely young German woman he had met while on holiday. But even as they set a wedding date, Mengele was summoned for a three-month stint in the Wehrmacht, the German Army. Preparations for war were under way, and young men around the country were being called up for training. Mengele was assigned to a mountain regiment in the Tyrol-seemingly an ideal assignment for the young man who enjoyed skiing and hiking.

But Mengele’s experience in the Wehrmacht proved to have a fateful impact on his life. According to Dr. Kurt Lambertz, one of his best friends from the period, Mengele developed an intense dislike of the unit’s commanding officer. The personality clash ended in a brawl between the two. Although Mengele completed his training period, his career in the Wehrmacht was finished. He decided instead to join the SS-the Nazis’ most elite and ruthless corps of soldiers. As a young officer/ doctor Mengele was assured of a distinguished future, serving with the brightest, the most dashing-and the most fanatic-Nazis.

Mengele and Irene were married in July 1939. Weeks later, war broke out and Mengele found himself drafted. His first assignment was an administrative post at the SS Race and Resettlement Office, reviewing applications for German citizenship. In the countries surrounding Germany, such as the Soviet Union and other Slavic lands, there were hundreds of thousands of people who claimed German ancestry. In Hitler’s view of the world, the German “nation” encompassed all Germans-wherever they might be living. It was the duty of the Reich to bring them back into the fold. Mengele’s office was charged with sorting through the applications to determine the “real” Germans: those who met the racial and genealogical criteria.

It was almost two years before Mengele got his first taste of combat.

In June 1941, he was sent to the Ukraine as part of the Waffen SS.

He proved to be an excellent soldier, and received the Iron Cross, Second Class, for his heroic service on the battlefield. The following year, he joined the SS Viking Division as a field physician. Here, Mengele finally practiced medicine, but under the worst conditions.

Epidemics were common during the hot, sticky summers. Winters were so cold as to be unbearable. Thousands of men died every day in fierce battles, and there was neither enough equipment nor medication to keep the wounded alive.

It was on the Russian front that Mengele honed the art of selection.

Due to the shortage of time and supplies, he was forced to make snap decisions as to who among the wounded would be treated, and who would be left to die. The task of choosing among the German soldiers was gruesome to Mengele, and he hated it, he later told friends and colleagues. But he resolved to be dedicated and brave. He ended up being awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, for pulling two wounded soldiers from a burning tank under enemy fire. As one commendation he received stated, Mengele had “conducted himself brilliantly in the face of the enemy.

TWINS’ FATH R (ZYL SPIEG L): “Were you ever a soldier?” Mengele asked me after he had pulled me out of the selection line.

I had been standing with a group of twins. Because of my years as an officer, I tended to stand very straight. Mengele noticed that immediately.

I told Mengele about my background in the Czech military. Because of this, Mengele appointed me to be in charge of the twin boys. My title would be

“Twins’ Father.” I was to supervise about eighty boy twins.

But he warned me that if anything went wrong, I would be killed on the spot.

At the end of 1942, Mengele was wounded-it is unclear ho wand declared unfit for combat. He was sent back to Germany and reunited with his wife and his old mentor, Verschuer. The SS reassigned him to their Race and Resettlement Office, working in the Berlin Division overseeing the concentration camps. It was another desk job, far from the scientific work he loved.

Sometime that year, Verschuer had left Frankfurt to assume the lofty position of director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, possibly the most prestigious scientific job in Germany. As Mengele grew disillusioned with his bureaucratic job, Verschuer and he began exploring other options that would get him back where he wanted to be: inside a laboratory.

Both Mengele and Verschuer were aware of the exciting research being undertaken in some of the concentration camps. Since 1939, medical-research projects of various kinds had been under way, including experiments perfumed on human subjects. All known standards of medical ethics had been swept aside by the Nazis. To find a cure for typhoid fever, the bane of the German Army, Nazi doctors infected prisoners at the Buchenwald camp with the virus, then tried to “treat” them by injecting them with various serums. At Dachau and other camps, Jews and other inmates were exposed to tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, smallpox, influenza, and yellow fever as the Nazis tried to learn how to control these deadly maladies. Nineteen Fortytwo was also the year when German doctors began their gruesome attempts to discover the most efficient method of mass sterilization.

By far the most intriguing research possibilities were offered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. It was at Auschwitz that a certain Dr. Horst Schumann had begun exposing men, women, and children to massive doses of radiation-a promising way of achieving the desired sterilization. The largest of all the camps, Auschwitz had more than ten thousand inmates arriving each day-an unimagined number of potential human subjects. They could provide a scientist with a broad cross-section of racial groups. Twins and other interesting genetic specimens were likely to pass through as well.