Mengele’s charm is real, but also it is only half of him. He is friendly man on the outside; but on inside he is vicious, and it explodes for no reason, without warning.
He make rabbis dance, and then he send them to gas chamber.
He rip gold teeth from corpses and send them to his family home in Günzburg.
He hit a man over the head with an iron bar until eye and ear disappear under blood, and head is simply red ball on body.
He throws youngest baby onto stove, other baby onto pile of corpses, because no one tell him that their mothers are pregnant.
He shoots people for stopping on street without permission.
He has whole kindergarten, three hundred children, burnt alive in open fire. Children try to escape, and he hit them with sticks until they die.
One time, he find us cooking stolen potatoes, and he fly into huge rage. “Yes,” he shouts, “yes; this is how I imagine a Jewish hospital. You dirty whores, you unspeakable Jewish swine.”
And then someone shows him a jar with a fetus in one piece—this is very rare—and he calms down instantly, all smiles and appreciation.
Oh, we discuss his psychology; everywhere were rumors about Mengele, and you know Jews: we’ll gossip as long as we’ve got tongues in our mouths.
Mengele’s mother, Walburga, was huge woman, one moment warm and maternal, next moment a raging bull. Josef—Beppo, she call him—was her favorite son; the only one who can get her to smile.
In return, he very loyal to her, always takes her side.
His father, Karl, was at the family factory all the time; the Mengeles were the biggest employers in Günzburg. Karl wanted Josef to follow him into the business, but Josef had aims for higher things.
A mother who wanted that he be austere and chaste when he likes luxury and to indulge, and a father whose place he must take through achieving more.
No wonder that Josef becomes the Janus Man; one moment affectionate, the next cruel. Maybe he is man of two part, one made at Auschwitz, the other in place long before. The Auschwitz self let him operate in extermination camp; the other let him keep pieces of decency.
You see, Herbert, my thinkings toward him are also split.
Yes, I hate him, for everything he did. He sent my mother to the gas chamber on our first day there. He make it that my father works to death.
As for me and Esther, well, you see soon enough.
But also I remember his kindnesses, and I know, too, that without him I would be dead now.
Because Esther and I were twin, and twins were privileged in Auschwitz—a stupid word to use, “privilege,” in there, but it feels like that.
Mengele is interested—no, to call spade a spade, he is obsessed—with twins. In his evil heart, he has soft spot, small core of good, especially for twins.
And so they keep us apart and away, separate from all the shit.
We get best food—chocolates, white bread, milk with lukchen, mixture like macaroni—in camp this is very special.
For us the smartest clothes; white pantaloons for boys, silk dresses for girls.
Also, and the best, we keep our own hair, so at least we look human.
We don’t have to be at roll call.
They slap our wrists for offenses which usually have death penalty.
They let us play under skies which crematorium flames make red like blood.
We are chosen ones, darlings always spoiled, and all because of Mengele. For his being two—angel and monster, gentle doctor and the sadistic killer—no better symbol than twin.
They put us in Barrack 14 of camp F in Birkenau, sister camp to Auschwitz. All kinds of twin there, like the Ark: big Hungarian soccer players, old Austrian gentlemen, gypsy dwarves. Mengele himself tattoos us with numbers, all beginning with letters “ZW” for zwillinge: twins.
“You’re a little girl,” he said. “You will grow, and some day you say that Dr. Josef Mengele himself give you your number. You’ll be famous. But important not to scratch it. Do this for your Uncle Pepi, no? Be more brave than Uncle Pepi, you know? Here is secret. They want to make number mark for Uncle Pepi, under his armpit, but he refused.”
Hygiene in the twins’ barrack was perfect; Mengele insisted that no infection is allowed.
Infection. You begin to see where this goes, yes?
We were like horses, a stud farm for him.
He wants twins because he thinks we give to him the secrets of life, show the parts of humanity nature is controlling, and also the parts which are from environment. If we share things, he think them from the gene; when things differ, must be from environment and experience.
They put us in baths and clean us. Then they take us to the laboratory on trucks with red cross; must be stolen, maybe just fakes.
Laboratory is smart, no different to laboratory you find in a large German city; marble tables with channels on sides for the drainage, porcelain sinks against the wall, rooms with armchairs, microscopes, and bookshelves, all the latest scientific publications.
First he weighs us, then he measures and compares, every part of our bodies—every part.
Esther and I always sit together, always nude.
We sit for hours together, and they measure her, and then me, and then me again and then her: how wide our ears and nose and mouth, the structure of our bones. Everything in detail, they want to know.
They talk of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars and subhumans, prototypes, repulsive, characteristic; all hard to understand, all sounding bad.
We are scared, of course, but never at the same time. When I shake, Esther holds me until I stop, or she cries while I hold her hand. We know that one of us has to remain strong at all times. The moment we give in together, we never recover.
We forget our differences the moment we arrive in Auschwitz. Every day, we are closer than ever, because we have to. It is that, or death.
Now the endless probes: needles to take fluids from our backs, immersion in steel vats full with cold water, pulleys holding us head to floor to measure speed of blood draining from our stomachs.
Awful, no?
I tell you, you compare to the others, and Esther and I are the lucky ones.
Mengele injects twins with typhus and tuberculosis.
He sterilizes women; he castrates men.
When twins are brother and sister, he makes them have sex with each other.
He takes a girl, seven year old, and tries to connect her urine tract to her colon.
He sews two gypsy twins back to back. He wants to connect their blood vessels with their organs. For three days, the twins scream and cry, all the time. Then they die of gangrene.
I know all these medical terms in English, because every day I think of them.
Then Mengele decides that in vivo tests are no good. Results much better from corpse than from living person. In normal life, twins die at same time not often; now, he can kill them at once, and make dissections to see results.
He takes needles and fills them with Evipal or chloroform. Five cubic centimeter of Evipal into the right arm, the victim sleeps, then ten cubic centimeter into the left ventricle of the heart, and instant death. Perhaps a little humane.
But sometimes, when not much stocks, maybe a day when he wants to be sadist, he fills the needles with petrol instead.
These experiments don’t work, of course. He tries to take from twins secrets we just don’t have, it’s insane.
Always he tells us that it’s a sin, a crime, not to use the possibilities which Auschwitz has for twin research, as never will another chance come along like this.
Maybe he looks for the secret of multiple birth so he can help repopulate the German nation. Perhaps he thinks he creates a new super-race, like breeding horses. After us, maybe the Poles; then maybe someone else.
And all so, so ironic, you know? Two ironies, both vile.
First, Mengele is fixated on purity of race, but this not something applying to he himself. Somewhere among his ancestors is doubt a
bout paternity, and so he has no place in the Sippenbuch, the Kinship Book, for those who can prove that their families are pure Aryan for at least two hundred year. Himmler sent silver spoons to every family which has borne a “pure” child. For Mengele, no spoon; not for his own birth, not for his son.
Secondly, I don’t know if the experiments on twins have scientific meaning, but if there is, Mengele is not the man to find it. He is no genius. Dedicated and fanatic, yes, but at heart an assistant, not a leader. An efficient assistant. For him, he takes theories of genetics and race like he puts on white gloves and hat. He does whatever pleases him; he does experiments and ignores the result, blood all over his clothes, his hands examining like a possessed man. The mania of a collector; typical Germanic characteristic, gone wild.
You know what we are? A private zoo.
If twins are the lucky ones—and we are, even with all this—then Esther and I are the most fortunate of all, almost up to the end.
Maybe Mengele likes us more than the rest. Maybe his hated bureaucrats keep us safe, more in what they miss than what they do.
One day, early 1945, our luck runs out.
It is bitterly cold. I remember tongues of fire and smoke from the crematorium stacks, the air full with stench of burning bodies, the walls bouncing with screams of the damned, everywhere the rat-tat of machine guns fired point-blank.
The fires were so big; Allied aircraft must have seen them.
Why didn’t they bomb? Why didn’t they come and blow us all to bits?
Mengele comes rushing in, gone berserk.
“The Bolsheviks are coming!” he screams. “The Bolsheviks are coming! All this will fall into their hands. Well, I won’t have that. Not in a thousand year.”
He starts putting everything in his trunk: papers, stationery, instruments. Pack, pack, pack, all very fast, not another word spoken to us, his face distorted in frenzy.
And then he stop, eyes blazing. Shouts he could still make great scientific discovery that will save the Reich.
He has insane ideas, many, many, almost all; but the most lunatic, if you ask me, is that he can make blond hair and blue eyes. Genetic engineering, he calls it.
He looks round the room, and he stops on Esther and me, because we are the most dark there: black hair, brown eyes.
If he can make it work on us, he can make it work on anybody.
He takes us into a small room. Every nurse, he tells them to come, hold us down.
I start to scream. I know what he is going to do.
Mengele works at a table. He takes huge needle and fills it with vile chemical. I think, as I watch, that it spits like a snake.
The dose must be stronger than ever before, he says. Previous experiments did not work because dosage too weak. He is almost shouting.
The nurses hold me down and clamp my eyes open with pincers.
Mengele advances on me. The needle looks as big as the Eiffel Tower.
I look away, to the wall.
There, pinned up like butterflies, are hundreds of human eye, rows and rows, all labeled neatly with numbers and letters, and in half the colors of the rainbow: brilliant blue, yellow, violet, green, red, gray.
Eye without body and without sight, all watching me without blinking.
It is the last thing I ever see.
You ask me how it feels to be blind, sudden and without warning.
Well, to be honest, it is only one of my problems; because Esther is right next to me, and when she sees what Mengele has done, she starts screaming, louder than I ever hear anyone.
They hit her, I hear her fall, people shout in German; and still she screams.
Then there is a gunshot, no louder than Esther’s cries, and she is silent.
Of the next few days, I don’t remember much.
I said nothing and had no real thoughts, just sensations; confusion, bafflement.
My first real memory is when they push us out of the camp, and we start on the death march. These things, the savage cold and perfect agony, these are the only ones which can stop me being numb.
I was alone, but I still had so much to say to Esther and share with her. Everything she and I had ever done was now without meaning. The biggest tragedy of my life, and who else would I seek but her for help?
But she is gone.
Dreadful, dreadful, that the disaster takes from me the only person I needed.
As though half of me is ripped out.
People who lose limb say they still get phantom pains, years later. That is how I feel; a part of me was missing, a physical part.
I am without balance, lopsided, bleak, hollow. The world is distant. I watch, I do not take part. I am an observer.
An observer who cannot see.
There were thousands of us on that march, but I walked alone. My soul pirouetted silently through life, joined with her shadow. We had arrived together, Esther and I; why would we not leave together, too?
Without Esther, I could not imagine myself. Worse, I could not imagine life itself. I had ceased to exist.
Why hadn’t Mengele shot me, too? I begged him to. But no; he wanted me alive. He had injected a super dose of methylene blue into my eye, and he wanted to see if it had worked.
You’re married and your spouse dies, so you change; you go from wife to widow, husband to widower. But when your twin dies, you’re still twin. I played with words. I was twin. I had twin. I am twin. They all mean nothing.
For everyone else, they lose someone close, and is awful, but they still have memories of life without that person: husbands before they met their wives, parents before they had their children.
Not for a minute did I know how it was, not to have a twin. You can marry again, even have another child; but you can never have another twin. You are still the person you were, except when you’re a twin; then you are half, and that’s it.
What did I do? I did what any twin would do. I take on Esther’s characteristics. Her mannerisms, her laugh, even her voice sometimes.
Like she borrowed me for a moment.
I had been quiet; now I was a chatterbox, like I had swallowed a gramophone needle. Before, I avoided danger. Now I looked for it, and being blind helped, because if I could not see it, it could not hurt me.
In any case, I knew already the worst pain possible. What else could there be?
Now, years later, I know the truth: I felt guilty for still being alive, and thought that if I could die, that guilt would go.
For Esther, I was Cain: I had taken her place, her life.
Would I have changed positions, given my life for hers? In the beat of a heart.
I had no one else; all my family had died in Auschwitz.
Why was I the only one to live? For one person, one single person, to come out with me; someone else to share my responsibility, someone else who failed to save our family.
I was angry, and at everyone. Angry at myself, more lucky than my twin and my parents. Angry at the good fortune of those who had survived with their own families, more or less.
I felt an impostor. I was no saint; why was I so lucky?
Guilt, humiliation, and shame. How to beat them? How to take back dignity?
Over time, I found the answer. The same way to live life itself: day by day.
I realized that things happen, and not necessarily for a reason, but still they happen. Someone must survive, after all. Someone must bear witness.
Oh yes, Herbert, that is big part of being Jewish, bearing witness. You want to find what happened to Max Stensness, I try to help you, because he was killed, and that must be made better.
I stopped thinking: Why me? I started to think Why not me? Maybe I was chosen, maybe not. I was still here, because, maybe I don’t know it, but because I struggle, I have strength, I make the best of what I have.
I want to give Esther a gift, and now I see what that gift is. I must not let go of this life and be with her. Instead, I stay alive for as long as I can. I live my life for her as well as fo
r me; I am her window on the world, and all the joys and sadnesses in my life are for her as well.
We had shared life before birth; we share it after death, too.
Being a twin doesn’t stop when there’s only one of you, because there’s never really only one of you. We who have been are one another forever.
Suddenly I was afraid to die because, if I died, then so would she. With her alive, I would not be so lonely. But at the same time, I would forever have been half a person, always existing against her, compared to her, opposed to her. We had been one soul in two body; now we were one soul in one body. The skin was around us, not me.
In Nigeria, solo twins from Yoruba tribe carry round their necks a wooden image which represents their dead twin. This way, the dead twin’s spirit has a refuge, and the survivor has company. For me, no such souvenir, but nonetheless I carry Esther with me wherever I go.
So the me I knew before was gone, and instead came discovery, rebirth, excitement. And that’s why I forgive Mengele.
You’re surprised? Don’t be. I forgive him because that is only way to sanity.
I don’t know what he does now. He escaped the Allies, they had him at a camp and he escaped. He’s probably in Brazil, or Paraguay, or Argentina, getting fat and molesting the local girls. I don’t know, and I don’t care.
I don’t absolve him, no, never; but he left me with life, and so with a choice: what to do with that life.
So I make my choice, and my choice is to forgive.
I forgive, and he has no hold over me anymore. For some survivors, everything is always Auschwitz; they’re more at home with their memories than in the real world, and that’s all they can think and talk about.
Not me. This is first time I tell anyone this, Herbert. No one else knows, because until now no one could understand; but you I think are different, and I hope you are worthy of it.
I have many friends, but no one for such confiding.
I have many lovers, but no one who I give my heart to.
How could I? How will I ever have with someone what I had with Esther?
I already have a soul mate; I don’t need another.
“Can I touch your face?” Hannah said. “I want to see if you smile or not.”
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