DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  Children of the Flames by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel

  Penguin USA

  ISBN: 0140169318

  Paperback Reprint edition (May 1992) Preface.

  CANDLES IN THE NIGHT.

  In the winter of 1984, I was asked by Parade magazine to seek out the longlost child survivors of Dr. Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz during World War II. Of the estimated three thousand twins-most of them young children-who had passed through Mengele’s laboratories between 1943 and 1944, only about a hundred were known to have survived. Many fewer were thought to be still alive when I undertook my search for them in America and Israel.

  I was aided in this effort by Eva and Miriam Mores, twin sisters who had undergone painful experiments at Mengele’s hands. Eva, an American housewife living in Terre Haute, Indiana, had long believed the twins’ ordeal, which had received no more than a passing reference in the history of the Holocaust, should be told. Determined to reunite all the surviving twins, Eva and her sister had just founded an international society of Auschwitz twins-CANDLES-an acronym for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Laboratory Experiments Survivors.

  Through this group, the twins hoped to piece together what had been done to them in Mengele’s laboratory. For unlike other death-camp survivors, these child victims had kept totally silent about their past. Ridden with guilt and with shame, most had never breathed a word about their ordeal as guinea pigs of the notorious Dr. Mengele, not even to loved ones. Theirs was the untold story of the Holocaust.

  A few well-placed ads in Israeli newspapers yielded gratifying results.

  Within days, dozens of twin survivors (most of whom had ended up in Israel after the war) came forward to join CANDLES. In tearful reunions, they reforged the bond that had helped them survive both the death camp and Mengele’s demonic experiments. All were united in their fierce desire to see the war criminal brought to justice.

  I arrived in Israel in March to begin my interviews with Mengele’s twins.

  Although, thanks to CANDLES’ burgeoning membership rolls, tracking down their names and addresses was relatively simple, arranging actual meetings with them was considerably more difficult. Only at the gentle prodding of Miriam and Eva did a number of twins agree to see me. Each session began with the whispered confession,

  “I have never spoken of this to anyone.”

  But for many of the twins, simply telling what happened to them proved to be a release. Middle-aged, they spoke with the candor, intensity, and strange eloquence of the very young. In talking with me, many even reverted to the mannerisms of childhood-losing their adult composure as they related searing memories of camp life. One woman, recalling the rats scurrying across her toes at night as she tried to sleep in the hard wooden stall that was her bed, shook and shivered like a little girl. A male twin winced and whimpered like a child while telling of a painful injection Mengele had given him. But then his face lit up with a boyish grin as he described the delicious candy the doctor offered him moments after. They seemed in many ways to still be the frightened eight-or ten-year-olds of yesteryear, listening for the sound of Dr. Mengele’s footsteps, dreading the arrival of the trucks that would take them to his laboratory. They wept as the memories came flooding back.

  Profoundly moved by their stories, I often found myself crying with them.

  Only a handful of the twins were able to provide me with a complete account of their lives from the period before the war through the years after Auschwitz. Instead, most seemed obsessed by one period or another. Some vividly remembered Mengele’s experiments, volunteering precise details on the blood tests, injections, X rays, and surgeries they had undergone. Others focused on the SS doctor himself-his visits to their barracks, how he liked to sit and chat with them. A few of the twins insisted they had no memories of Auschwitz whatsoever.

  Instead, they dwelt on the sadness of their postwar adult lives-their emotional upheavals, physical breakdowns, and longings for the dead parents they had hardly known. The younger they were at Auschwitz and the less they consciously remembered, the greater their turmoil as adults: That was the rule.

  Mengele’s passion for selecting Jews for the gas chambers of Auschwitz had earned him the title “the Angel of Death.” With a flick of the wrist, he would consign thousands to die. Among the few exceptions were the young twins he plucked out from the selection lines for use in his research. As a genetic scientist, Mengele hoped to produce a master race of blond, blue-eyed Aryans.

  Twins were the key. What better way to test out theories on heredity than by experimenting on heredity’s perfect genetic specimens: identical twins.

  Most of the twins began their descent into Auschwitz by witnessing their entire families being led away from them to be killed. In their special barracks, located just yards away from the crematoriums, they observed the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews at close range. Twins as young as five and six years of age endured torture, daily blood tests, and starvation diets, as well as facing exposure to epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis, and other deadly diseases that were rampant because of unsanitary conditions. Worst of all, of course, were Mengele’s barbaric pseudoscientific experiments. But horrific as their lives were, the twins enjoyed a special privileged status, for they were regarded as

  “Mengele’s children.” And as such, they were spared the random selections and march to the gas chambers that threatened every other Auschwitz inmate.

  Despite their ordeal, many of them clung to their childlike faith in life.

  During Mengele’s mandated “recreation periods,” male twins played soccer under a sky made brighter by the flames pouring out of the crematoriums.

  Little girls were taken to fields on the outskirts of the camp, where they picked bunches of wildflowers.

  Some of the children even grew to like Mengele, substituting him for the father they had lost. “Uncle Mengele,” as they called him, delighted them with candy, joked with them, hugged and kissed them.

  Some were persuaded that at the bottom of his evil heart was a soul spot-an untapped core of goodness-reserved especially for his twins.

  “I believe Josef Mengele loved little children,” Vera Blau, a twin from Tel Aviv, insisted to me during our first interview. “Yes! Even though he was a murderer and a killer.”

  In writing this book, Mengele’s special relationship with children emerged as the most puzzling-and fascinating-aspect of this “angel” of death. Monstrous as he was, Mengele still managed throughout his life to charm and beguile youngsters. The bizarre, mysterious bond forged between Mengele and “his” twins at Auschwitz remained long after they had parted company.

  However hard they tried, none could banish the memories of the handsome young doctor who had tortured and-they thought, loved them.

  I was not alone in being touched and inspired by the twins’ stories of their life under the abominable Dr. Mengele. My article

  “The Twins of Auschwitz Today,” which appeared on the cover of Parade that September, was reprinted in newspapers in several countries, and prompted an outpouring of response from readers around the world. Thousands called for renewed efforts to hunt Dr. Mengele. In November of 1984, former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Nazihunter Beale Klarsfeld, both prominent in the battle to track down and prosecute Nazi war criminals, invited me to accompany their delegation to Paraguay as an observer in the search for Mengele.

  The four-member delegation, which included Bishop Rene Valero of the Brooklyn Catholic Diocese and Menachem Rosensalt, the child of Holocaust survivors, confronted the regime of General Alfredo Stroessner for information on the war crimin
al. Stroessner had once granted Mengele Paraguayan citizenship, and he was long believed to be sheltering the SS doctor. If Holtzman’s mission failed to pressure the old dictator, it did for the first time awaken the United States government’s interest in locating Josef Mengele.

  CANDLES’ dramatic weeklong pilgrimage to Auschwitz in January 1985, the twins’ march across the desolate Birkenau camp a few miles away, and their emotional televised prayers at the long-standing crematorium, attracted worldwide attention. Partly as a result of their moving appeals, three separate countries decided to reopen their Mengele files. By the spring of 1985, Israel, West Germany, and the United States officially joined forces in a full-fledged hunt for the greatest killer of the Holocaust known to be still at large. A network of intelligence agencies, from the CIA and the Israeli Mossad to Interpol, agreed to cooperate to find the notorious Nazi doctor.

  Mengele’s children had effectively spurred the largest and most ambitious hunt ever for a war criminal. The twins quietly rejoiced at this excess of international attention, after so many years of indifference to the disappearance of their nemesis. Their experiences at the camp had made each one of them a philosopher-cynical at the ways of the world, yet strangely hopeful.

  On a return trip to Israel in April 1988, I reminisced with the twins over the extraordinary events of the last four years. I found them media-savvy and, in stark contrast to our earlier meetings, quite comfortable with discussing their Auschwitz experience. Several were now lecturing around the country, and one twin, Vera Kriegel, was even flying regularly to West Germany to address audiences there about the Holocaust. Like small candles in the night, the twins were shedding light over a period of history still shrouded in strange and terrifying mystery.

  My reunion with the twins also served as an affirmation of my own unique bond with them. I had been the first journalist ever to search out and systematically interview them, to help make their stories known to the world.

  I had rejoiced at their media triumphs and cheered their successful efforts to belatedly obtain reparations from the West German government. I felt as shocked and disappointed as they did when a body alleged to be Mengele’s was discovered in Brazil in June 1985, and the global hunt was called off None of the twins believes the skeleton found in a lonely gravesite in Embu is that of Dr. Mengele. The weight of public opinion-and scientific testimony-has not been sufficient to convince them he is really dead. Supremely distrustful of scientists, they point to the fact that not one of the legions of forensic pathologists who examined the remains ever declared with 100 percent certainty the body was Mengele’s. Since the Israeli government has consistently refused to close the case, since both Israel and West Germany continue to offer rewards for his capture, they are hopeful the real Josef Mengele will yet be found.

  For them, he is still alive. They can see him standing there in his impeccable uniform, smiling, insisting he will never hurt them. How he loves to linger and play games! He enjoys seeing them dressed in the beautiful clothes he himself brings to their barracks-white pantaloons for the boys, silk dresses for the girls.

  But they also cannot forget the terror of his laboratory, the blood tests, the injections, the experiments, the murderous operations.

  Mengele’s twins are now inching into old age. Most are married, with children and grandchildren of their own. But despite the presence of spouses, friends, and neighbors, they have periods of despair, when the present seems far less real than the past. When no one is looking, they pull out faded letters and old photographs. With trembling hands, they peer at pictures of dead parents and siblings, or of themselves before the horror. These are the times they realize they will never escape the shadow of the Angel of Death. While going about their daily chores, they may catch a glimpse of his face with its cynical half-smile, the sadistic glint in his eye. They see the legions of skeletal men and women being carted away to their deaths. And then they remember the other children, their arms and legs flecked with bruises from Mengele’s needles: the twins who, unlike themselves, did not survive.

  Many of the twins suffer from a recurrent nightmare that they are back at Auschwitz. In their dreams, angry dogs bark while tall men in uniforms relentlessly pursue them across dark, ominous terrains. And when these looming figures catch up with them, as they invariably do, Mengele’s twins cry in their sleep, as they surely cried as children so many years ago.

  Their nights are also filled with the ghosts of their loved ones.

  Again and again, they relive the moment their parents, brothers, and sisters were herded into the gas chambers. They hear their family’s resigned footsteps trudging into the stark rooms disguised as showers and imagine their surprise and terror when gas gushes out instead of water.

  Hedvah and Leah Stern find that as they grow older, they think about their mother even more than before. They can clearly see the lovely young woman in a black print dress, waving good-bye as she promises they will be reunited. In the stillness of an Israeli night, Hedvah and Leah hear their mother shouting to them,

  “Wait, children, wait-wait for me at the gate.”

  Her anguished cries have carried over the busy, eventful years, like an echo reverberating louder and louder over a deepening abyss.

  For most, the passage of time has failed to bring peace of mind.

  Nearly half a century later, they feel guilty at having been born twins. after all, despite all they suffered as Mengele’s guinea pigs, they still enjoyed the privileged status he bestowed upon them.

  Mengele’s twins are condemned to live with a terrible double-edged sword: the hell they endured because of Mengele, and the life they owe him as “his” children.

  “Why were we spared?” Mengele’s twins ask themselves today. “Why were we the only ones in our family to survive?” The more fortunate ones turn to their lone surviving sibling for comfort and answers, only to find the same sense of bewilderment and despair.

  The sights of the camp-the dead bodies, the bones, the crematoriums spewing bright red flames into the ver million skies-have continued to haunt Mengele’s twins. They emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust dazed, anxious to leave the past behind them, but they have learned the past will never leave them. And although they last saw Josef Mengele in the winter of 1944, he has remained an ever-present force in each of their lives. This is his story-and theirs. LUCE MA TALoN LAGNADO I came to the story of Mengele’s children through my late husband, and although I am an American, his story became mine. I met Alex Shlomo Dekel while living in Israel in January 1962, and we were married one year later. My American upbringing had intrigued him; his European past had fascinated me: the gallant widowed mother, who had raised him and his brother before they were transported to Auschwitz in the first convoy from his native Hungary; his experiences in the concentration camp as a Mengele guinea pig; and his liberation from Birkenau by American GIs, who saved his life at the time by intravenous feedings.

  Alex was not a twin, but He had been spared an almost certain death because of his Aryan good looks and his German-language fluency. Not long after we started seeing each other, he began to tell me his story.

  Especially haunting, I thought, was his final memory of his mother, whom he had spotted despite her shaved head in an adjacent yard behind a barbed-wire fence. As one of Mengele’s “privileged” children, he knew he had more rations than she, and so he saved up all his food for the day to give to her.

  She refused to take it from her child, so he threw it over the fence, where she was forced to retrieve it. Later he told me that he had survived by dreaming at night of consuming huge meals, and that this had given him the strength to face the starvation of the next day.

  Nourished on dreams!

  That he had been a child prisoner of Auschwitz I understood. That it would color his entire life I did not. But after we were married, I discovered and gradually came to share his all-consuming passion to find Mengele and bring him to justice. Auschwitz was never far beneath the surface of
his thoughts. He would try to forget, but from time to time it would emerge, in episodes of unexplained rage and in periods of deep depressions that I now understand are scorched into the Auschwitz legacy of all the survivors.

  Israel became his raison d’etre. I told him it was his revenge. His life was often in danger, starting with his swimming ashore illegally from Cyprus where his ship had been detained by the British, through his dare-devil exploits, first in the Haganah and, later, in the service of the Israeli government (some of which still cannot be revealed). His entire life was shaped by forces outside of himself.

  Like so many others, Israel became his lost family. I sensed he was sometimes more at home in the memories of Auschwitz than in the real world. For the survivor, all is always Auschwitz.

  As an archivist attached to the Israeli consulate in New York, Alex began to collect information on Mengele’s every move. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the pieces of information he shared with me on the death-camp doctor’s whereabouts. Given enough time, I was sure I could make him forget. after all, we were living in America now. We had each other. But being married to him was like being married to a secret agent. There were always secrets. His wasn’t exactly the kind of work a wife could innocently ask about at the end of the day. “What did you do today, dear?” I tried that only once!

  His compulsive search for Mengele gradually escalated into a full-scale, one-man hunt. He began to contact anyone who had ever heard of Mengele and might have knowledge of him. I remember being awakened one night by a telephone call at 3:00 A.M. from South America: Someone had phoned to report a sighting. There were many such calls.

  The papers Alex accumulated began to take on the dimensions of a personal library. Every newspaper clipping and magazine article, anything related to Mengele’s whereabouts, helped Alex put pieces of evidence together in the manner He had learned during his twenty-five years as an intelligence officer for the Israeli government. Alex soon pinpointed Mengele’s various residences and many of his movements in and out of South America. He even located a wholesale pharmacist supplying drugs to Brazil-and concocted a wild scheme to take Mengele’s medicine to him (which I vetoed as being far too dangerous). Anyone who had even the remotest connection with Mengele or with South America was a welcome visitor in our home.