DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  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.

  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.