DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (9 page)

We were very frightened of the experiments. They took a lot of blood from us. We fainted several times, and the SS guards were very amused.

We were not very developed. The Nazis made us remove our clothes, and then they took photographs of us.

The SS guards would point to us and laugh. We stood naked in front of these young Nazi thugs, shaking from cold and fear, and they laughed.

The strict veil of secrecy imposed over the experiments enabled Mengele to work more effectively. Twins who were subjected to the most grotesque procedures took his secrets to their graves. And those as yet unhurt had only secondhand stories about what was being done.

No one at Auschwitz-not the prisoners, not the SS guards, not even other doctors-knew precisely what Mengele was doing with his twins, either while they were alive or after they had died. Even the children who themselves were the subjects of his tests did not know what the objectives of the experiments were. Rumors were rampant, especially when children were taken out in Red Cross trucks, never to be seen again.

There was a calculated effort by Mengele to limit information, presumably to keep his “guinea pigs” from panicking. One can only guess how the twins would have reacted had they known of the existence of Mengele’s lugubrious pathology laboratory where bodies of children were daily brought over to his assistants to have still more “tests” performed.

The secrecy enabled Mengele to establish an ostensibly friendly rapport with the twins-at least, the very young ones. He loved to sit and chat with them. He seemed more relaxed, more himself, in the twins’ barracks than anywhere else at Auschwitz. Only with those young children could he joke and laugh. With them, he was the Beppo his friends and family in Gunzburg had known-ineffably sweet, charming, and affectionate.

Mengele especially seemed to dote on the very youngest twins, the toddlers who could hardly walk and talk, and were completely dependent on him. There was a little boy, about three or four years old, who bore a striking resemblance to Mengele himself. He was a dark child, with large brown eyes, a round face, and a gentle disposition.

Mengele came to the barracks often to visit this one child, scooping him up in his arms, kissing him, and showering him with toys and chocolates. When asked his name, the boy would reply,

“My name is Mengele.” The Auschwitz doctor himself had taught the child to say this, as a father would teach his son.

VERA BLAU: Mengele loved this child. He had a twin brother, but Mengele played only with him.

I believe Josef Mengele loved children-even though he was a murderer and a killer. Yes! I remember him as a gentle man.

During this period, Mengele himself had become a father. His son, Rolf, was born on March Il, 1944, when Mengele had been at Auschwitz for almost one year. But he could rarely get away from the camp to spend time with Irene and the baby. Mengele may have been lavishing displaced affection for his own son on the little Jewish boy.

The twins were Mengele’s pampered children-the most privileged inhabitants of Auschwitz. He arranged more and more perquisites for them. Zyl Spiegel, the Twins’ Father, was permitted to hold makeshift classes and recreation periods to entertain the youngsters. An avid sportsman in his own youth, Mengele personally organized soccer matches with teams composed of the twins. It was an eerie sight for other inmates to observe the children running, shouting, tossing a ball.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: Mengele took us to a concert once. I still remember it-because it was so awful.

It was held just outside our compound. The orchestra was made up entirely of women prisoners. Listening to them play was heartbreaking.

It reminded us so much of normal life… the life we’d had before the life that other people still led.

TWINS’ FATHER: I felt very sorry for the young twins. I was always trying to make their lives a little more bearable.

I was twenty-nine years old when I was deported. I felt at least that I had tasted life-whereas most of the twins hadn’t even begun to live.

I saw my most important task as maintaining the children’s morale.

That was difficult, because there were so many periods when I myself despaired of ever surviving the concentration camp.

Quite often, twins would come over to me and start crying. They missed their parents. Or else they were hungry, and their stomachs were hurting.

I would try to comfort them. I calmed them down by telling them they would be meeting up with their parents within a very short time.

The twins wanted more than anything else to go home. They would ask me if I thought the war would ever end. I would reassure them. I promised I would take them home myself the day it was over.

They believed me. They looked up to me, I guess.

I organized classes. I would teach them math, history, geography.

We had no books, of course. But I still gave them simple exercises to do. I taught them whatever I could remember from my own school days.

I would also talk to them about the day the war would end and they would all get to go home.

I was very anxious about keeping the children together, and as close to me physically as possible. Children are children wherever they are.

The twins wanted to walk around the camp-and, of course, that was very dangerous.

An SS guard who might not know they were Mengele’s twins could kill them on the spot. That was why I thought up games and classes.

This way, I knew where they were at all times.

I also distrusted Mengele. I felt he could change his mind about the twins at any time and have us all killed. And so my strategy was to have the twins maintain as low a profile as possible-and keep out of Mengele’s way.

The youngest children were not aware of the darker side of the man they affectionately called

“Uncle Mengele.” They did not know about the surgeries of unspeakable horror. It is not that Mengele confined the more gruesome and painful studies to the older children, but that they were too young to comprehend the sinister experiments.

They saw only a cheerful, avuncular doctor who rewarded them with candy if they behaved. But the older twins, and the adults, such as the twins’ mothers and Jewish doctors who saw Mengele at work, recognized his kindness as a deception-yet another of his perverse experiments, whose aim was to test their mental endurance. The fact that Mengele could behave so nicely even as he inflicted pain, torture, and death made him the most feared man at Auschwitz.

However, in performing his diabolical experiments on twins, Mengele believed he was pursuing high-minded scientific goals. Personal ambition also played its role in propelling Mengele to exceed even Nazi standards of cruelty, so that he stood out from other death-camp doctors. Driven by a need to reach the peak of his profession, he no doubt believed that if he only worked hard enough, performed enough experimental studies, tested a sufficient number of twins, then he would be recognized as the great scientist he thought he was.

But despite his dedication and fanaticism, the mediocre student of Gunzburg never possessed any real brilliance. The tests, questionnaires, and many of the experiments themselves appear to have been the brainchild of Verschuer. At his best, Josef Mengele was earnest and efficient, an excellent “assistant,” but even at his most fiendish, he was not a man of ideas. In Munich, in Frankfurt, and even now at Auschwitz, he was merely methodical and perverse. If there was ever a “great” racial scientist, it was Otmar von Verschuer.

Mengele’s fundamental narcissism, however, led him to try to make himself into a first-rate scientist, as he had made himself elegant and stylish. Mengele never saw his personal limitations and the gap between his real and imagined abilities, of course. He donned genetic theories and questionable racial dogma the way he put on white gloves and a hat. Obsessed with his own appearance, the vain young Beppo of Gunzburg was devoting his life to a science whose aims-fostering a race of “beautiful” people-mirrored his own personal obsession.

ALEX D KEL: I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself believed he was doing serious medical work-not from the slipshod way he went about it. He was only exercising his power.

Mengele ran a butcher shop-major surgeries were performed without anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation-Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthesia.

Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying.

Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given.

Nobody ever questioned him-why did this one die? why did that one perish? The patients did not count.

He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part.

In this sham universe of scientific truths, half-truths, and outright lies, the experiments administered on the children represented a catalog of criminality and cruelty. Blood would be transfused from one twin to the other, and the results duly noted and compared. Bizarre psychological tests, designed to measure endurance, were continually made. For instance, a small child would be placed in isolation, in a small, cage like room, with or without his twin. The children would be exposed to various stimuli and their reactions recorded. There are twins who recall they were targets of an insidious psychological barrage, but years later were still too traumatized to conjure up the details. And finally, there were the surgeries, the horrible, murderous operations.

Mengele would plunder a twin’s body, sometimes removing organs and limbs. He injected the children with lethal germs, including typhus and tuberculosis, to see how quickly they succumbed to the diseases.

Many became infected and died. He also attempted to change the sex of some twins. Female twins were sterilized; males were castrated.

What was the point of these ghoulish experiments? No one, neither the child-victims nor the adult witnesses, ever really knew. Mengele constantly probed the children, trying to wrest from them secrets they did not possess.

VERA BLAU: Mengele performed some very painful experiments on my sister, Rachel.

She was very ill during her entire stay at the camp.

They would wheel her in and out of the operating room. But she does not remember what they did.

She remembers only the lights-the big red lights flashing down on her as they were about to operate…

Several twins believe that Mengele had pairs of twins mate. There are hushed testimonies to that effect. Although all the twins deny firsthand knowledge, and many insist it never happened, there were rumors around the barracks that such perverse experiments were indeed taking place. No twin will elaborate on what he or she knew: Even in the nightmare world of Auschwitz, there were taboos, and this was the ultimate one. That Mengele breached it is not unlikely, given the awful scope of his experiments. We will probably never know for sure.

Unless, of course, one twin, haunted by the memory of the forcible incestuous coupling, steps forward and testifies.

The final step in Mengele’s scientific program was to kill the children and have their organs analyzed. Occasionally, though, if a twin seemed to be an especially “interesting” specimen, Mengele skipped the usual series of experiments and simply injected him or her with a shot of phenol to the heart. An autopsy would be performed, and various limbs and organs sent to Verschuer’s Berlin institute.

Mengele’s mentor, in turn, subjected these to further scrutiny.

If Mengele’s experiments seemed to each twin to become ever more diabolical, that was only an illusion: The intended objective had always been the death of the children. What the twins who had arrived in the spring and summer of 1944 did not know was that many other groups had preceded them. It was only a matter of time before their turn came.

MOSHE OFFER: One day, my twin brother, Tibi, was taken away for some special experiments. Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why-perhaps because he was the older twin.

Mengele made several operations on Tibi.

One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore.

Then they took out his sexual organs.

After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore.

I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt.

They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers-and now, my twin.

three.

THE ANGEL OF DEATH.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN.

There was a yard at Auschwitz, and there we waited for the airplanes.

For the British. For the Americans. For the Russians. For anyone who could save us.

MENASH LORINCZI: When we spotted the planes, we would pray,

“Please God, bomb Auschwitz! Even if you have to kill us in the process, bomb the camp.”

We were ready to die if it would mean the end of this horror.

But they never did. We watched the planes fly over us, but none of them ever dropped a single bomb on Auschwitz. I could not understand it-none of us could.

Every day, thousands of Hungarian Jews arrived on the trains. We watched them disembark. We saw them being herded into the crematoriums, which were working twenty-four hours a day.

TWINS’ FATHER: The children would stand for hours just watching the flames.

The crematoriums were located only one hundred meters away from the twins’ barracks. There was just a small fence in between.

The twins could see the transports-the trains pulling into Birkenau.

They missed nothing that was going on at Auschwitz.

In front of the compound, there was a place where the Germans collected the dead bodies. There would be fifty, sixty, or a hundred corpses piled one on top of the other. These were then taken to the crematoriums in little wheelbarrows.

But there were times the people were still alive. And the children could see that some of these “corpses” were still living.

All day, the twins observed Mengele motioning people to go to the right and to the left. They watched the masses of people going into the crematoriums.