DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  Mengele’s prospects, seemingly so glum only a few years back, had brightened considerably. In many ways, the exile years in Argentina had proven to be idyllic. Dr. Mengele once again enjoyed friends, money, status, and considerable nifluence.

  eight.

  THE ANGEL RETREATS VERA GROSSMAN.

  Times were very hard for us in Israel. Our family had no money. We moved to a horrible slum in the Arab section of Ha if a. It was the only apartment our parents could afford.

  The window of my room overlooked a courtyard. I would watch as drug addicts injected themselves. It was terrifying.

  Our parents had four babies to support, but there was nothing to eat in the house. It was so different from the life we had known in England.

  Yet in England we had also suffered, because we missed our mother.

  Olga and I were forced to abandon our studies and go to work. We were only fifteen years old. Our entire schooling consisted of the five years we’d spent in England.

  I had dreamed of studying drawing. Instead, I had to take whatever job I could find to earn some money.

  I took a hundred different odd jobs. I did anything and everything to earn a bit of money. I worked in an ice-cream factory. I became a dressmaker. Olga got a job as a hairdresser. Whatever we earned, we gave to our mother-every last penny. We never bought anything for ourselves.

  I remember going to stores and smelling the food because I was hungry, yet buying nothing. I would take the money and tell Mother,

  “Don’t worry about me, I don’t need anything.”

  One day, a matchmaker introduced me to an American boy who was looking for a bride. He was a very, very rich young man, and he was prepared to take me to the United States.

  He liked me, and tried to persuade me to marry him. He offered me a good life in America. But I refused.

  When he persisted, I finally told him,

  “Look. I have been through hell living apart from my mother. Now that I am with her, I am not going to leave her to go to America with you.”

  Yet the situation at home kept getting worse. Olga was very sick.

  And no one could figure out what was wrong with her. She kept fainting.

  OLGA GROSSMAN: On Yom Kippur, I passed out at the synagogue. In the middle of services I fell to the ground. My mother panicked and asked, “Could someone please bring some water?”

  A soldier in uniform came out of the crowd, and brought me a glass of water. His name was Rafael, and he was the only person in the entire congregation who bothered to come to my aid.

  I saw him like a dream when I woke up. He was so handsome.

  We got to know each other when I went to thank him. I was very shy. I could hardly look at a boy. But I realized he was everything for me.

  As far as I was concerned, he was my guardian angel-I called him my angel Rafael.

  It turned out we had similar backgrounds. He, too, had been at Auschwitz. He was the only one in his entire family to have come out alive. He lost his parents, his two brothers, and a sister.

  There was an instant kinship between us, but he didn’t propose immediately. I was only seventeen; he was ten years older. He was a professional soldier. I liked that. He was very masculine, very tough.

  It gave me courage, seeing him in uniform.

  When he asked me to marry him, my parents were worried because I was so young. He promised them he would wait-until I turned eighteen. We were married the following year.

  The ski trip to Switzerland gave Mengele an opportunity to get to know not only his son but also the woman who would later become his bride.

  Martha Mengele, the tall, attractive widow of his brother Karl, had got along famously with Josef. Martha moved to Argentina with her twelve-year-old son, Karl Heinz, in the fall of 1956. They settled in Mengele’s impressive villa in Olivos, near Peron’s former residence.

  Photographs they sent back to the family in Gunzburg showed a dashing couple. At last, Mengele had the “family unit” he had craved-husband, wife, and child together again.

  On the surface, Martha and Josef seemed a perfect match. Like Mengele, Martha was a triumph of style over substance. During her Gunzburg youth, she had been an object of admiration because of her lithe figure and beautiful face. At thirty-five, she took pains with her appearance, and looked, in the words of an old acquaintance, “like a fashion model.” The couple was urged to marry by relatives, particularly Karl Sr. It is unclear how well Martha knew her brotherin-law before she gave in to Karl Sr.’s pressure. Certainly, by marrying Josef, she solved two of his most pressing concerns: retaining the firm in Mengcle hands and caring for Beppo in South America. The Mengeles had been worried that popular Martha would remarry outside the family.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: As a young girl, my mother was so overprotective, she didn’t even want me to go out on dates. I could not make any friends.

  If a boy invited me to the cinema, she would say to me,

  “Why should you go out to the movies with him tonight, and leave me here alone?”

  I invariably turned the boy down.

  Mother was always talking about Ruthie. She would tell me,

  “If I had the other twin, it would be much easier. But I only have you.

  My love is only for you.”

  I was very close to my mother-too close. She would not let me lead a normal life. I was very much under her control. Our relationship was not healthy-especially her attachment to me.

  The native Israeli girls, the

  “Sabras,” were so free, so sure of themselves. They had lots of friends. They went out with boys, alone and in groups. But I stayed home with my mother.

  One day, I was invited to a party by someone who was also from Eastern Europe. This time, I accepted the invitation.

  That’s how I met my husband. He was from Yugoslavia, and also a concentration-camp survivor.

  He had been at Bergen-Belsen. He lost both his mother and father when he was thirteen. The Nazis murdered them in front of him. He watched them being shot, and he remembered.

  We began going out. Mother didn’t like our relationship, of course, but I continued to see him. We went out for three years, and then he proposed. He was the only man I ever dated.

  Mother didn’t want me to marry him. She’d point out how poor we both were. “You have nothing and he has nothing.” she’d say. “What will become of you?” She thought I should stay with her until I found a better match.

  I decided to marry him anyway.

  In 1958, Martha and Josef decided to get married and flew to Uruguay for the ceremony News of the nuptials caused a stir in Gunzburg.

  Josef’s boyhood friends were astonished that he had married his late brother’s wife. Those who knew Martha were taken abac knot by her decision to marry yet another Mengele, but to live in some South American backwater. In Gunzburg, Martha was seen as a playgirl, and something of a gold digger. Years earlier, she had become pregnant by Karl Mengele, Jr while she was married to one of his best friends, a local businessman named Wilhelm Ensmann. She promptly divorced Ensmann and married Karl. The baby, Karl Heinz, was the object of a paternity suit, but a court ruled he was Karl’s child.

  Martha’s strong predilection for the good life was well-known. It was hard to imagine her doing without the comforts of Europe.

  VERA GROSSMAN: My husband, Shmuel, came from a family that was even poorer than mine. I met him through another matchmaker.

  He lived with his parents in an Arab village. His house was so run down that when I spent the night there, I kept thinking the roof would cave in.

  But he was a very good-looking boy, very nice and understanding.

  He was six years older than I, and worked as a pipe-fitter. We liked each other immediately, and he proposed.

  But our engagement wasn’t official until my stepfather gave his blessing. When my stepfather met Shmuel’s parents, they realized they had known each other in Poland before the war. My stepfather said they were a very good fami
ly, and he approved the union.

  The wedding took place only three months after we met. His family had to sell a cow to raise money for the ceremony.

  We rented the cheapest apartment we could find in Haifa. It was a little shack perched on top of the roof of a five-story building in the Arab section. There was a little room where you could fit a bed and nothing else-not even a dresser or a table. The bathroom was practically in the kitchen. It didn’t even have a closet.

  On my wedding day, I went over to the apartment to try to fix it up. I found a space in the wall where I decided to build a makeshift closet.

  I took a hammer and broke down the wall all by myself and constructed a small closet.

  I marched down the aisle with blisters on my hands.

  We couldn’t afford a honeymoon, so we moved into our apartment that same day. But first, I had to return my bridal gown, which I had borrowed from a friend.

  After the wedding, I went by foot to return it-I walked two or three kilometers because I couldn’t afford a taxi. Then I walked several kilometers more back to our new apartment.

  MOSHE OFFER: I met my first wife shortly after leaving the Blumenthal Hospital. I was seventeen, she was eighteen.

  We fell madly in love, and decided to get married immediately.

  She became pregnant shortly after our wedding. I was very happy for the first time since the war. At last, someone was taking care of me.

  I had no idea she herself was not well.

  I learned, too late, that she had a heart condition. She should never have gotten pregnant. She died in childbirth. She left behind a healthy baby girl, our daughter.

  I was devastated. I had loved her so much. She had saved my life.

  After she died, I didn’t know what to do. Finally, I showed up at the door of Blumenthal, carrying our baby in my arms.

  Josef and Martha’s bliss was short-lived. Within months of their marriage, he was picked up by the local police. When he had first arrived in Argentina eight years before, he had treated the sick daughter of his roommate at the pension in Vicente Loper. The authorities were investigating him for practicing medicine without a license. Mengele was also implicated in a ring of doctors who were illegally performing abortions. He was questioned by police and held for a few days, but the charges were apparently dropped.

  Mengele’s life was marred by yet more drama when his father died in 1959. The news was a terrible blow to Josef, who lost his most loyal supporter in the Mengele family. Karl Sr. had never stopped loving his son, in spite of the growing evidence of Beppo’s appalling crimes during the war.

  The death of Gunzburg’s leading citizen-and its largest employer-prompted a funeral procession that stretched across town.

  Hundreds of people came to pay their respects to the man who had done his best to make the Mengele name honorable again, and Josef is believed to have made a quick, furtive trip to attend his father’s funeral. Although the reports are contradictory, a couple that was friendly with Mengele at the time told German prosecutors that He was indeed in Gunzburg to pay his final respects. A large wreath appeared mysteriously OIl the grave of Karl Mengele, bearing the inscription, “Greetings from someone far away.

  The death of Karl Sr. came at a time when Mengele’s life was again stirred by turnLoil. In addition to his problems with the Argentine police, he was once again a wanted man. That same year, 1959, the German government made an effort to locate the Auschwitz doctor.

  It was spurred by a new breed of Nazihunters who were trying to track down old Nazi war criminals: concentration-camp survivors determined to avenge the deaths of loved ones by going after those who had escaped punishment.

  In Vienna, an Auschwitz survivor named Hermann Langbein had vivid memories of the Angel of Death standing at the head of the selection line. As secretary-general of the International Auschwitz Committee, Langbein corresponded with other Holocaust victims and tried to discover the whereabouts of major war criminals. He had always been particularly bothered by the fact that Mengele had eluded the courts-and the gallows. Langbein’s initial attempts to find out where Mengele had gone after the war proved fruitless. Ironically, it was Mengele’s divorce from Irene that enabled Langbein to track down the death-camp doctor to his South American retreat.

  Irene and Josef’s divorce papers, which had been filed in a Freiburg court in 1954, had conveniently included a document listing Mengele’s address as Buenos Aires. Clearly, neither Josef nor his family thought it risky anymore to list such revealing information. As it turned out, this was one of the very few mistakes the family made: By uncovering these documents, Langbein ascertained that Mengele was alive and well, and residing in Argentina under his own name.

  LEAN STERN: Some people tried to persuade my husband-to-be not to many me because of my past as a Mengele guinea pig. The two of us had met on the ship to Israel, and were friendly before we were romantically involved.

  His friends asked him why he was taking a chance settling down with a victim of Mengele’s experiments. They pointed out I might have trouble having children.

  But he loved me very much. He was determined to marry me whether I could have children or not.

  MENASHE LORINCZI: My future in-laws were very worried about my past as an Auschwitz twin; they wondered whether I was “healthy.”

  When I first met my wife, Yaffa, I thought she was so beautiful, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I wanted to marry her then and there.

  My family and I had recently moved to Netanya. She was a native Israeli who had lived in the city all her life. She noticed me because I was the “new boy in town.”

  I learned Yaffa was involved with another guy, but that didn’t put me off in the least. I had a friend of mine ask her point-blank if she was serious about the man. She told him she wasn’t. The next day, I asked her out on a date, along with another couple.

  At first, we double-dated a lot, or went out in a group. We’d go to the beach, to the theater, to the movies. Although I was in love with her, Yaffa wasn’t sure she wanted to marry me. She came from a very religious background.

  As I began turning up at her house more and more often, her parents asked her who I was, and whether my intentions were honorable.

  Even after I proposed-and she accepted-new problems creed up.

  Yaffa’s parents were worried because I was very skinny, and thought I might be sick because of my time at Auschwitz. I had not talked to them very much about my experiences in the death camp. At that time, survivors kept their mouths shut about the war.

  Some people told my wife’s parents I had been at Auschwitz. They were advised to think twice about letting their daughter marry me because of my past as a Mengele twin.

  Langbein set about amassing a file on Mengele and his crimes at Auschwitz, in the hope of having him extradited and tried. But when he presented his dossier to the West German government, he found the bureaucrats reluctant to reopen the case. West Germany had been out of the Nazihunting business for years, and not even the possibility of catching the infamous Dr. Mengele could goad them to action.

  Langbein persisted, until he finally got a prosecutor in Freiburg interested in the case. Germany issued its first arrest warrant for Mengele on June 7, 1959. The German Foreign Ministry was forced to seek his extradition from Argentina.

  This confluence of events persuaded Mengele he could no longer safely remain in Argentina, and that he needed to find a new home for himself, Martha, and Karl Heinz. He settled in Paraguay where his friends in the German community gladly offered him refuge. The future seemed perilous and uncertain-an unpleasant reminder of former days. The Argentine idyll was over. He was on the run once again.

  PETER SOMOGYL: One day, our father said we should leave Israel. He had never been able to open a successful business there, as he had in Eastern Europe.

  He felt there were better prospects elsewhere.

  But I didn’t want to leave Israel. It took a lot of convincing on the part of my father t
o get me to go.

  My twin brother and I went to I,ondon. We applied to emigrate to any country that would take all of us, where we could have a new life.

  Canada was our ideal. Our father had decided we would have better opportunities in Canada. He would join us after we were settled somewhere.

  Meanwhile, we needed to work to support ourselves in England. It really helped that I had a trade. I got a work permit, and I quickly got a job as an automobile mechanic.

  My brother had a harder time. He took odd jobs to earn money while he went to school. At one point, he was a garbage collector at Marks and Spencer.

  Both of us hoped and prayed we would get papers to emigrate to Canada.

  EVA MOZES: I knew my future husband only ten days when I decided to leave Israel and settle down with him in America.

  Mickey was also a Holocaust survivor. Like me, he had lost both his parents in the concentration camps. Although he was originally from Riga, in the Soviet Union, he had settled in Indiana.

  I knew his brother, who lived near me in Israel, very well. His family had plotted the match. They had wanted me to meet him, and had prepared me for his visit months before he got to Israel.

  When we met, we found we couldn’t even speak the other’s language. I knew very little English; he didn’t know Hebrew. We talked with two dictionaries. But I toured Israel with him, and we managed to have fun.

  During the ten days, he pressured me to agree to marry him. I told him,

  “Return to the U.S. and we’ll correspondI can’t make a decision that fast.” But he said no; he wanted the relationship to continue, we had to get engaged.

  My sister, Miriam, was married and had a baby. All my friends were married. I was twenty-six and still single, which was practically unheard of in those days. My aunt kept pressuring me to say yes.

  “Don’t be an old maid,” she’d tell me. “Get a divorce, but get married.”

  I was still heartbroken over a recent affair I’d had. Whatever I did, I could not forget the man. What made it worse was that he continued to see me, even though he was married now. He would pop in at any moment.