DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  It was a great love, but I knew it had no future. The thought of leaving Israel was very appealing. There was adventure in traveling to a new place. Going to America seemed wonderful.

  I told Mickey,

  “Okay, I’m going,” and left Israel on a plane bound for New York.

  LEA LoINCzi: In 1959, my husband convinced me to leave Israel and go to America with him. My husband had always wanted to live in the United States-that was his big dream. But he didn’t tell me that until after we were married.

  At first, I fought him. I didn’t want to leave my father and my twin brother. But he insisted. “Let us try it,” he told me. “If it doesn’t work out, we can always come back to Israel.”

  ZYL THE SAILOR: When I came to Israel, I joined the navy. That was how I came to realize I loved the sea, and decided to become a sailor.

  At first, I saw sailing as a means to an end. I knew I had an aunt in America, and I wanted to visit her. Afterwards, I continued to sail because I wanted to run away from Israel, and perhaps from myself And then, I kept sailing because I was used to it and it was an easy life.

  When I started sailing, I made plenty of money. The more I made, the more I spent. I was twenty years old, and I thought I was very old.

  I led a good life-the life of a vagabond. There were women in every port. We were always getting drunk.

  For those who live on land, buying a chair, a table, with the money they earn is a mark of success.

  But as a sailor, I spent money simply on having a good time. And that was okay, because you never knew if you would return from the next voyage.

  Mengele’s precise movements and whereabouts in the period between 1958 and 1960 are difficult to ascertain: the findings of scholars, journalists, investigators, and intelligence specialists concerning this period are often contradictory. What is known is that as the search for Mengele intensified, he retreated from Argentina to Paraguay, from Paraguay to Brazil, making trips between the three countries before finally finding a safe haven in Paraguay in 1959. The regime of Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner was even more accommodating to Nazis than Argentina’s had been under Peron. When Mengele applied for Paraguayan citizenship in the fall of 1959, two good friends swore to his worthy character: Werner Jung, head of the local Nazi party, and Captain Alejandro von Eckstein, the White Russian known for his fascist views and who had first been introduced to Mengele by their mutual friend Hans Ulrich Rudel. Both men claimed that Mengele had been in Paraguay for the five-year period requisite for citizenship. Von Eckstein, who had fought in the Chaco Wars under then-Captain Stroessner, was able to draw on his connections with the dictator, enabling Mengele to obtain a Paraguayan ID-under his own name-and become naturalized as a citizen.

  Mengele continued to return to Argentina even after he obtained Paraguayan citizenship. He still had substantial interests back in Buenos Aires, including his villa in Olivos and his share in the Fadro pharmaceuticals company, and had to make frequent trips to liquidate his various holdings. He even went back to work at Fadro for a period.

  His former coworkers thought he seemed rather glum.

  Although in the course of these sojourns there were occasions for the Argentine and German governments to nab him, Mengele remained free.

  The Argentines who had provided Mengele a safe haven all these years were certainly not anxious to extradite him. As for the German diplomats in Buenos Aires and Asuncion who were handling Bonn’s requests for information on Mengele, they, too, cast a cold eye on the initiatives to capture the Auschwitz doctor.

  Newly declassified files of the U.S. State Department provide a fascinating glimpse of the minuet the German and Argentine governments performed to help out the Angel of Death. According to cables sent by the U.S. embassy back to Washington in June 1959 (while Mengele was shuttling back and forth between Buenos Aires and Asuncion), the German government asked Argentina to begin proceedings to allow Mengele to be extradited. The Argentines coolly replied that their own inquiry had revealed “no record of the subject’s entry into this country.” This was despite the fact that Mengele was listed in the Buenos Aires telephone book under his wife’s name. With remarkable gall, Argentine officials pressed Germany for “additional information” to support their criminal allegations against Mengele.

  The Germans didn’t respond until six months later, when they sent Mengele’s address to Argentina. Still, Argentine officials stalled.

  Possibly the bureaucrats felt that if they delayed long enough, the extradition request would fall by the wayside. More practically, sympathetic officials may have wanted to give Mengele additional time to arrange his departure. After all, the death-camp-doctor-turned-executive had a great deal of business to attend to in their country.

  When they did respond, the Argentines argued there was no formal extradition treaty between their country and Germany, and hence no legal mechanism they could use to accede to the Germans’ request.

  Instead, Buenos Aires officials said the case should be submitted to their solicitor general “for a recommendation.” This wasn’t done until June 1960-one full year after Germany’s initial request for extradition. “But by then, Mengele, who had finally been located in this country (Argentina), had disappeared,” read one of the cables from the U.S. embassy. The various delays had given the war criminal more than ample time to plan for his future and to take care of any outstanding business interests. According to an Israeli diplomat who was then assigned to Buenos Aires, Mengele even made a nice profit on the sale of his luxurious villa in Olivos.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: For the first five years I was married, my mother, my husband, and I lived together in a cramped apartment in Haifa. It was awful, the three of us squeezed under one roof But Mother wouldn’t have it any other way.

  We could have afforded another apartment for her, but she refused.

  She was afraid to live alone.

  What made it even worse was the fact that I was working to support us, while my husband was studying at the university. My mother thought it was shocking that a woman would have to go to work. She made it very difficult r me.

  I was in conflict the whole time. I was torn between my mother and husband. On the one hand, I wanted to be free, and lead my own life.

  On the other hand, I had been brought up that one should feel responsible toward one’s parents. My poor husband had no choice but to accept the situation.

  LEA LoRINCzI: We led a hard life at first in the United States. It was very difficult to establish ourselves financially.

  Even though my husband didn’t want me to work, I decided to get a job.

  Since I couldn’t speak English, I was not able to be a nurse.

  Instead, I was hired at a sweater factory. I had to work hard to make ends meet.

  I felt very lost. I had left my family, and my new life was very trying.

  It took five years before we could afford to go home to Israel.

  Hidden away in Paraguay, at the home of his friend Alban Krugg, Mengele was planning his next move. During this period, Martha kept hoping they would resume their life together: she thought Buenos Aires was still safe for all of them. But Mengele, cautious as ever, had no such illusions. He planned to wait until his pursuers either got tired or despaired of being able to find him. His instincts to lay low proved to be absolutely right. By now, the Angel of Death was an expert on avoiding capture.

  Even as Mengele retreated out of sight, a small crack team of Israeli agents prepared to nab another ranking Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, the engineer of the Final Solution. They apparently hoped to capture Mengele at the same time. Eichmann was quietly whisked off the streets of Buenos Aires one evening in May 1960 as he returned from work. The agents persuaded Eichmann to tell them Mengele’s address, but by then it was too late. Mengele was safely ensconced in his Paraguayan retreat.

  On May 11, 1960, the capture of Eichmann was revealed to an incredulous world. Eichmann had been living under the pseudonym of Ricardo Kleme
nt. Each day, the former Gestapo colonel took a bus to his dreary job. Unlike Mengele, Eichmann had no family money to invest in a business of his own or to vacation within Swiss ski resorts.

  The man in charge of rounding up all of Europe’s Jews for the death camps was now nothing but a lowly clerk eking out a living to support a wife and four children. Instead of residing in a fine villa such as Mengele’s, his family was squeezed into a little house that had neither running water nor electricity.

  Mengele, for whom such things had always mattered, had not really socialized with Eichmann, presumably because his social status was too low. But they did share contacts in the Kameradenwerk, the secret organization that gave aid to former Nazis. Wilhelm Sassens, the journalist for Der Weg who had helped Mengele in his early days, had also befriended Eichmann.

  After the kidnapping, Martha decided she had had enough South American adventures and returned to Europe with little Karl Heinz.

  It was clear to her that she and Josef would never be able to lead a normal life together, and she had no interest in following him to his next place of refuge: Brazil. Life in the cultured, cosmopolitan Argentine capital had been tolerable for Martha; Paraguay and Brazil would be impossible. Martha’s complaints about her rough life in the backwaters of South America became the talk of Gunzburg. Residents of the sleepy town still chuckle when they remember Martha whining about her ordeal as the bride of Josef Mengele: Why, she had even been forced to do housework. Somehow, the image of sleek Martha mopping floors and scrubbing pots and pans in the wilds of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil engendered more derision than sympathy.

  VEEA GROSSMAN: After we were married, my husband and I continued to support our families-even though we had barely enough money to live ourselves.

  I suffered, but I never complained. I told myself As long as I am alive, it’s okay. My optimism helped me to overcome the hard times. I got through the hard times because of my spirit. I would tell my husband,

  “I don’t mind being poor.” With hope in your heart, you feel optimistic, and you overcome every hardship.

  In his Paraguayan hideout, Mengele wrote about the Eichmann capture in his journals, saying he now had to be even more careful than before.

  The good old days when he could saunter into the German embassy and coolly request an ID under his own name, then jet off for a European holiday, were gone forever. In the fall of 1960, Mengele moved to Brazil. His friend Rudel had set him up with a man who could help him, an unrepentant Austrian Nazi named Wolfgang Gerhard. Gerhard worked out a safe living arrangement for the Auschwitz doctor. Mengele went into hiding again, and remained out of the public eye for the rest of his life.

  The Eichmann capture seemed to augur a new era where Nazihunting would become a more aggressive pursuit. Men like Simon Wiesenthal and Langbein, both working out of Vienna, sought to pressure the German government, eager to forget the war and now securely launched into postwar reconstruction, to do more. Their persistence, combined with the anti-Nazi sentiments fueled by the Eichmann kidnap, jolted Germany out of its lethargy. In the fifteen years since the end of the war, the Germans had appeared reluctant to punish the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The Central Agency for Investigation of War Crimes, which had been assembled in 1958, had in two years accomplished very little.

  But months after Eichmann’s capture, the Germans revealed some dazzling Nazihunting skills of their own. Richard Baer, the commandant of Auschwitz after Rudolf Hess, was arrested, as were members of the Eichmann “team.” There was a new element at work that added impetus to Germany’s initiative to hunt down Nazis. The Eichmann Capture and trial had stirred up deep feelings of guilt and shame in many Germans.

  Gideon Hausner, the Israeli prosecutor, received many moving apologies from individuals throughout Germany in the course of the trial. One young German wrote Hausner that he wanted to “atone” for what his elders had done “against humanity.” He offered to work in Israel, and indicated his group of friends were ready to do the same. Their only question was,

  “Will you take us?” One German family wrote that they had been inspired by the revelations of Nazi atrocities to go see Dachau. Deeply moved, the family emerged from their tour of the death camp convinced that “whatever punishment was meted out to Eichmann was not enough.”

  MENASHE LORINCZI: Until the Eichmann trial, survivors never talked about the Holocaust because nobody believed them. When I was in the army, I tried to tell people what had happened to me at Auschwitz under Dr. Mengele.

  “Are you crazy?” the other soldiers said to me.

  HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: The Eichmann trial destroyed us inside.

  Everything came back-the dead bodies they piled up in front of our barracks, day and night, day and night, day and night. We kept thinking about that throughout the trial.

  Until then, no one spoke about what happened in the war. We would tell friends our stories, and nobody believed us-nobody.

  ALEX DEKEL: I went to see Eichmann, face-to-face, in his cell the day before he was executed. I asked him if he remembered me. He said no.

  Then I rolled up my sleeve and showed him the tattooed number on my arm. He turned away.

  MIRIAM MOB: After the war, it was something shamful to admit you were a Holocaust victim. Nobody wanted to talk about it.

  I was lucky. I was able to confide in my husband from the start.

  He was a good listener. I told him the whole story of what had happened to me at Auschwitz as a Mengele twin. He was a Sabra, and he had not lived through the war, but he was very interested-even in those years when nobody cared. He wanted to know all about the Holocaust.

  He sympathized with what I had gone through.

  He would tell me,

  “How could a child without a mother or father return to the world, go to school, get married and lead the life of a normal person?”

  He made me feel like a heroine.

  But in those years, I didn’t feel especially heroic. No one wanted to listen to my story. I had aunts and uncles, and several cousins. They never asked me what had happened to me at Auschwitz. They never wanted to know. And my feeling was that nobody wanted to know, except my husband-until Eichmann.

  During the Eichmann trial, this changed dramatically. Even though there was no television, only radio and newspapers, we all allowed it.

  Some survivors were so upset by the revelations, they committed suicide after the trial.

  The Germans refrained from requesting Eichmann’s extradition from Israel, presumably so as not to embarrass the Israelis or themselves.

  Germany had abolished capital punishment, and there was the disturbing possibility that even if they tried Eichmann, he would receive a lenient sentence.

  This, indeed, had been the outcome in the trials of most of the Nazis Germany had caught since the end of the war. Eichmann’s legal adviser had been sentenced to only five years’ hard labor. Otto Bradfish, who killed fifteen thousand Jews as part of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units in the East, got ten years’ hard labor. And Josef Lechthaler, who had slaughtered Jews in Russia, got only three-and a-half years behind bars.

  But however minimal Germany’s reckoning with its past, at least arrests were made. Germany even managed to apprehend a few high ranking Nazis still at large. Karl Wolff, for example, who had served on Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff, was nabbed and tried. He was quoted as saying how he had greeted “with particular joy. … he news that for two weeks now, a train has been carrying every day members of the Chosen People from Warsaw to Treblinka.”

  The seizure of Eichmann sent Nazis who were hiding around the world deeper into the underground. Like Eichmann-and Mengele -many of Hitler’s henchmen had sought refuge in South America, posing as simple citizens. They were in close touch with one another by way of what Hausner called a “grapevine that spanned the South American continent and reached into the remotest parts of the pampas and jungle.” From then on, every one of them would be haunted by the fea
r that a team of Israeli agents was on his tail, ready to pounce on him.

  Around the time of the Eichmann kidnapping and trial, Rolf Mengele was told by his stepfather, Hackenjos, that

  “Uncle Fritz,” the man he had corresponded with and loved from afar, was really his father.

  Interviews Rolf has given suggest he was deeply shaken by the revelation, coming as it did on the heels of newspaper stories depicting Mengele as a monster, and a perverted, ruthless war criminal.

  German newspapers were replete with sensational accounts of the Auschwitz Angel of Death, and young Rolf fifteen at the time, was teased about his last name.

  But as Rolf later told journalists, his family insisted to him the media accounts were wrong. He was told he should be proud to have Josef Mengele as a father. The Mengeles told Rolf that Josef was a good and brilliant man who spoke Greek and Latin fluently and had earned several advanced degrees. Rolf’s own cousin, Karl Heinz, who had lived with Mengele in South America, confirmed what the rest of the family was saying. Mengele was clever and caring. He had been a good father to him, strict, but extremely fair, Karl Heinz insisted.

  It was difficult for the teenager to try to reconcile the two images of Dr. Mengele-that provided by his family and the one offered by the rest of the world. Anguished by the revelations, he began failing at school. His teachers attributed this to the trauma of being the son of Josef Mengele. The tenor of his correspondence with the man he had known all his life as Uncle Fritz changed as a result, becoming erratic and petulant, he confided in these same interviews.

  OLGA GROSSMAN: How scary it was for me to have children. All the unpleasant memories came back to me. We had watched little babies thrown into the ovens.

  I was very, very worried during my pregnancies. I suffered all the time. What will come out of me? I wondered. This child, will it be normal?

  I would agonize over what had been done to me by Dr. Mengele.

  I was sure I would have an abnormal baby-because of all the tests and experiments.