DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (7 page)

MAGDA SPIEGEL: I was twenty-nine years old, married, with a son of my own, when my family was deported to Auschwitz from our village in Czechoslovakia.

We had all made the trip in the same cattle car, but we were separated the minute we arrived. My mother, my son, and I were told to go to the left side, toward the crematoriums.

SS guards were yelling,

“Twins, twins, we want twins.” I saw a very good-looking man coming toward me. It was Mengele.

He was with two guards, and my twin brother, Zyl. My brother had told Mengele he was a twin, and that he had a sister.

Twigs’ FATHER: To this day, I am not sure why I admitted I was a twin.

My previous experience in labor camps had taught me never to volunteer for anything.

Magda and I were born in 1915 in Budapest. When we were little, our family had moved to Munkacs, a town in Czechoslovakia renowned throughout Europe for its flourishing Jewish community.

When I was twenty-one, I was drafted into the Czech military, [where] I became an officer. But because I was Jewish, I was ultimately sent to a series of labor camps. When I came back to my hometown, it was only to be placed in the Jewish ghetto.

From there, my entire family-my parents, my twin sister, and her son-were put in a cattle car bound for Auschwitz.

Once I had informed Mengele I had a twin sister, he went looking for her-and plucked her out of the lines marching to the gas chambers.

MAGDA SPIEGEL: Mengele pointed to Zyl and asked me,

“Are you the twin of this man?”

I said yes.

Then, Mengele noticed my child. “Who is this little boy?” he asked.

“He is my son,” I answered.

“Please leave the boy with your mother,” Mengele told me very nicely.

With the aid of Verschuer, Mengele obtained a position as an SS doctor at Auschwitz. Verschuer even helped Mengele win grants to undertake two research projects at the camp. He was to begin in April 1943.

What a splendid laboratory Auschwitz promised to be! Unique in the world of science, it offered unlimited possibilities for work… for medicine … for experiments. At last, the chance to do the kind of research Mengele had dreamed of. At Auschwitz, there would be nothing to stand in his way.

HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: Mother was determined to hold on to us. She hid us under her skirt.

But at the last minute, she told us,

“Go to Dr. Mengele. He is asking for twins. Go and we will meet by the gate.

“Wait for me, children, wait for me,” she cried. “We will meet again by the gate.”

two.

AUSCHWITZ MOVIE.

MAGDA SPIEGEL.

A few hours after arriving at Auschwitz, I asked some people,

“Where is my little boy?” My son was only seven years old. I was very worried about him.

“You see these chimneys?” they replied, pointing toward the crematoriums. “Your child is there. Your parents are there. Your entire family is there. And one day, you will also be there.”

This was told to me the same day I had come-the same day.

Dr. Mengele was the only person who was always standing there when the trains came. He was constantly making selections.

The sky was red-red- the whole sky was red!

It was the last year of the transports, and the Germans were putting masses-masses and masses-of people into the crematorium.

It was like watching a movie.

Even early in the morning, the sky over Auschwitz looked opaque and foreboding, as if it were covered by a vast blood-soaked sheet. An oppressive smell permeated the air-soot and burning flesh, fumes from the crematoriums, and smoke from the arriving trains.

After the trains had pulled in and the cattle-car doors were opened, exhausted cargoes of Jews tumbled out. As SS men shouted,

“Faster!

Faster!,” hordes of people were pushed tllis way and that by the uniformed guards. Women cried as their husbands were taken away from them. Old men clutched their wives in a final embrace. Small children huddled closer to their parents, sad and subdued. And the Nazis stomped around, cracking their whips on anyone who stood in their way, and even on those who were merely standing.

VERA BLAU: When I arrived at Auschwitz in April 1944, my first impression was that it was very crowded.

My twin sister, Rachel, and I were eleven years old. We had come with our mother and little brother, and both of us started crying when we were separated from them. Then a woman from Czechoslovakia came over to us. She had been in Auschwitz a long time.

“Do not cry, children, do not cry,” she said to us. “You see, they are burning your parents.”

I did not believe her. I did not want to believe her.

What is universally known today as Auschwitz is in fact something of a misnomer. Auschwitz was the slave-labor camp in which murder was an everyday phenomenon, but, in fact, the Polish place name became the umbrella word for several camps. Although the slaves largely labored at Auschwitz, it was at Birkenau, a couple of miles away, that many of them were executed. And although the world lexicon came to equate Auschwitz with the gas chambers, it was Birkenau that was the actual extermination center. It was Birkenau where the ovens never stopped flaming and where SS physicians regularly dispatched inmates to the crematorium; and it was Birkenau where Dr. Mengele worked in his laboratory, and where his beloved twins were bar racked and where so many of them inevitably perished.

Just one year after arriving at the death camp, Mengele was thoroughly absorbed in his research, the first step of which was selecting his subjects. Every morning, at the crack of dawn, he could be seen in the area where the transports disembarked, scanning the new arrivals.

Standing there in his perfectly tailored SS uniform, white gloves, and officer’s cap, Mengele looked impeccable-a host greeting guests arriving at his home. He sometimes stood for hours without flinching, a hint of a smile on his face, his elegantly gloved hand beckoning the prisoners to the right or to the left. Often, he whistled softly as he worked, the Blue Danube waltz, or an aria from his favorite Puccini opera.

Mengele even engaged some of the new arrivals in friendly conversation, asking them how the journey had been, and how they were feeling. If they complained of being sick, he listened with a sympathetic ear-and then sent them straightaway to die in the gas chambers. He actually seemed interested in hearing all the gruesome details: how uncomfortable the trip had been, how cramped and stifling the cattle cars were, how many Jews had died along the way.

Occasionally, Mengele pulled aside inmates and asked them to write “postcards” to their relatives back home. He seemed to take a special pleasure in dictating these notes, describing how lovely Auschwitz was, and urging everyone to visit. But once the postcards were prepared, their authors were summarily dispatched to the gas chambers.

Only when an interesting “specimen” came along did Mengele really spring to life. He urgently motioned to a nearby guard to yank the new arrival out of the line. SS guards were ordered to watch for any unusual or striking genetic material-the dwarfs, the giants, the hunchbacks-and to bring them immediately to Mengele. But most important of all to him were the twins.

ZYL THE SAILOR: My twin brother and I were marching toward the gas chambers when we heard people yelling,

“Twins! twins!” We were yanked out of the lines and brought over to Dr. Mengele.

I was not quite thirteen years old when my family was deported to Auschwitz-I hadn’t been bar mitzvahed yet. I came from a small village in Hungary where my father’s family had lived for generations.

My mother came from Galicia, in Poland. There were eight children in our family.

When we stepped off the cattle car, there was Dr. Mengele.

He was making the selections, deciding who would go to work and who would go to the gas chambers. He used his finger. He motioned everyone in my family in the direction of the crematorium.

As we marched to the crematorium, our mother told us,

“You must not cry.” To this day, I do not know who told the Germans we were twins and had us removed from the line.

MENASHE LORINCZI: Nobody knew whether it was good or bad to be a twin.

Although the SS guards were going around asking for twins, families were afraid to volunteer their children.

Many twins died because their parents didn’t want to be separated from them. Mothers walked with their twins straight into the gas chambers.

EVA MOZES: Once the SS guard knew we were twins, Miriam and I were taken away from our mother, without any warning or explanation.

Our screams fell on deaf ears. I remember looking back and seeing my mother’s arms stretched out in despair as we were led away by a soldier.

That was the last time I ever saw her.

The twins who passed through the gates of Auschwitz were of all ages, but often they were very young children who fought and cried at being separated from their loved ones. If Mengele was on the scene, he tried to soothe the terrified parents. He would smile as he comforted an anguished mother, insisting her twins would be in good hands.

And if the twins were just infants, Mengele might sometimes pull their mother out of the line as well, permitting her to accompany and look after them. Most often, however, the children were taken away alone.

Once separated from their parents, the twins were marched through the camp, where they witnessed scenes of unparalleled horror. Piles of corpses were everywhere. Lying next to them, and virtually indistinguishable, were men and women thin as skeletons. These were the

“Mussulmans”-the halfdead, with no strength or will to live, who were simply awaiting being carted to the gas chamber. A foul odor permeated the camp, which, combined with the heat, made it difficult to breathe. It was an absolute assault on the senses. Children clung to their twin, their last remaining links with the families they had lost.

The twins’ initiation into Auschwitz formally began when they, like all new inmates, were showered and branded. They cried out in pain as numbers were etched into their flesh with searing metal rods.

But unlike the other prisoners, who were given camp uniforms and whose heads were shaved, the twins were allowed to keep both their clothes and their long hair. These differences made them immediately recognizable as

“Mengele’s children.”

Despite these small privileges, the twins sank into despair within hours of arrival as they began to understand what had happened to their families. Once in their own compound, where at any given time there could be scores of twins, boys and girls separately lodged, they were briefed by the other children about the realities of life and death at AuschwitzBirkenau. Those newcomers who had not understood what they had seen were told about the gas chambers and crematoriums, and the probable fate of the family members they had left behind. In the case of male twins, whose wooden barracks stood only yards away from the crematorium, virtually facing it, Twins’ Father took it upon himself to break the news gently, and at times delayed it for days or weeks. The little girls, who had no such parental figure to ease the transition, were less fortunate. Even though many of the children chose not to accept, or were too young to fully comprehend, what they were told about their own parents, it was a devastating moment.

MOsHE OFFER: I felt so tired, that first day at Auschwitz. There was a terrible smell -it was impossible to escape the smell.

I was very worried about my mother, my father, and my four brothers. I talked with [my twin brother] Tibi about them.

But he was sure our mother was going to be safe.

HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: We kept crying and looking for our mother. She had promised she would meet us at the gate.

We would search among the women for her dress. When we were separated, she’d been wearing a striking black dress with pink strawberries.

We couldn’t eat. We were constantly crying and looking toward the gate for our mother.

Finally, the head of our barracks said,

“Come here” and pointed to the crematorium.

“I can now tell you that your mother and the rest of your family went to the gas chambers.”

EVA MOZ S: In the early evening, we were finally taken to our barracks.

There, we met other twins, some of whom had been at Auschwitz a long time.

There were only girls in the barracks, I can’t remember exactly how many. Maybe hundreds of little girls. The barracks themselves were filthy. They had these red brick ovens [for heating] running across them, and wooden bunk beds, without pillows. [We] slept two, three, four girls to a bunk bed.

That first night, we went to the latrines. They were just holes in the ground, with waste in them. There was no running water. Everything stank.

I remember seeing three dead children on the ground. Later, we would always be finding dead children on the floor of the latrines.

From our barracks, we could see huge smoking chimneys towering high above the camp. There were glowing flames rising from above them.

“What are they burning so late in the evening?” I asked the other children.

“The Germans are burning people,” they answered.

But the new twins also learned that, as proteges of the powerful Dr. Mengele, their own lives in this kingdom of death were guaranteed.

Mengele made sure that his twins would be generally well-treated, at least by Auschwitz standards. They were spared the beatings and punishments inflicted on other inmates. Because they “belonged” to Mengele, no one, not even the most brutal camp guards, would dare lay a hand on them. In addition to keeping their clothes and hair, some of the twins, especially the boys, recall receiving somewhat better food rations than the other prisoners. Although all the twins say they were ravenously hungry throughout their stay, several remember having access to potatoes and slices of bread, which enabled them to survive.

If caught stealing food-as many did, on a regular basis-they were not severely punished because of their protected status. Most important, the twins were not subjected to the terrifying random selections that adult prisoners faced. As long as they stayed healthy and useful to Dr. Mengele, they would be kept alive.