DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  The company 5 German executives knew I was Jewish when they hired me: I told them straight out. I also told them I was a concentration camp victim. I even showed them my tattooed number. It turned out there were a couple of other Jews working there, too. Most of the German employees were very careful about what they said around us. Many of them had emigrated to Canada; they had probably been Nazis.

  The firm was very good to me. I was promoted quickly. I was transferred from the Toronto office to Montreal, and made manager. I was able to send for my father, who was still in Israel. I even got him a job at Bosch, also.

  In Montreal, the office manager’s husband was also German. Out of the blue, one day, he formally apologized to my father for having been a Nazi during the war. He told him how much he regretted his past actions.

  I continued to be promoted. My bosses liked my work, but I knew even then I would probably never reach the top, because I wasn’t German.

  One day, one of our regular German customers dropped by. We started chatting. He said he had a Jewish boss and that he didn’t like him very much. He complained his boss didn’t want to give him a raise.

  He was confiding in me for he assumed that because I worked for Bosch, I was German. He had no idea I was both Jewish and a Holocaust survivor.

  The more he talked, the more he made antiSemitic remarks. He finally said something about “those Jews-isn’t it a pity Hitler didn’t finish the job.”

  That’s when I lost my temper. I grabbed him by his shirt and told him, “You’re talking to the wrong man. Get out, and don’t you ever come in here again.”

  Then I went to my German boss and told him what I had done. I said, “Customer or not, I had to throw him out-you can fire me if you want.

  But my boss was behind me all the way. I continued to do well in the firm.

  In Mengele’s eyes, the “new” Germany forgave those it wanted to forgive, while making scapegoats out of a small number of others. He may have been thinking jealously of his former scientific colleagues who were now successfully reintegrated into German life, foremost among them his old mentor Verschuer, now professor emeritus at the University of Munster. Any hint of his past crimes had been conveniently erased.

  How stark the contrast to what had been done to Mengele. Even after all these years, still “one revived the guilt of certain people,” he wrote in the same letter to Sedlmeier, alluding to efforts by Germany to bring Nazis to book. He seemed to see a parallel between his own plight and that of Germany. Quoting former German president von Hindenburg, he observed,

  “It is easy to tread on a dead lion.”

  Life on the remote Brazilian farm was lonely and miserable. He was posing as a Swiss emigre named Peter Hochbichler. His companions were a Hungarian couple named Geza and Gitta Stammer. His old friend Colonel Rudel had asked another acquaintance, a fanatic Austrian Nazi named Wolfgang Gerhard, to find people who could protect Mengele.

  Gerhard had recommended the Stammers, who had been avid fascists prior to leaving their native Hungary during the Russian invasion of 1956.

  Even if they learned of the lonely SS doctor’s identity, Gerhard gambled they would be sympathetic. A deal was worked out. The Stammers were to care for

  “Hochbichler,” about whom they were told only that he was a Swiss exile. Mengele family money helped pay for a small farm the Stammers would “own.” Mengele would assist in managing the farm-at no salary-a deal remIniscent of his days on the Fischer farm in Mangolding.

  Mengele went to live with the Stammers in 1961. The Stammers were amiable enough, especially the wife, Gitta, but they were clearly on neither Mengele’s social nor his intellectual level. After the dazzling Nazi company he had kept in Argentina and Paraguay, it was hard to get used to spending his time with a couple of uneducated farmers.

  With little else to occupy him, Mengele concentrated on his memoirs, a project that required painstaking effort on his part. That first year, he frequently felt blocked. “Beginning of memoirs difficult,” he says in one diary entry. In another, he explains he has rewritten a portion of his autobiography, and

  “I am still displeased with it.”

  Mengele was unhappy in Brazil, a country whose multiracial population he could not like. Middle-aged, tired, and grumpy, he undoubtedly felt very much the outsider in this land of the young and exuberant. At one point, as Mengele was arduously transcribing his innermost thoughts, the noise and revelry from local villagers’ Carnaval festivities disturbed his concentration. Carnaval, the traditional holiday held the day before Lent that Brazilians celebrate with special joy and ardor, had also been an occasion for parties in the Gunzburg of his youth. Then, the young Beppo was seen at all the Mardi Gras balls.

  But now, he only expressed loathing at the joie de vivre of his Brazilian neighbors. Deeply bothered by the revelry, he complained in his diary that the noise hampered his work on his memoirs.

  Although he was only in his early fifties, the once-promising young doctor was turning into a crotchety hypochondriac, writing daily reports of how he felt, and constantly worried about developing some dread disease. “Strong migraine and attack of aphasia,” wrote Mengele on January 24, 1962. (Aphasia, the inability to speak or understand the spoken word, would have been an alarming ailment for the voluble Auschwitz doctor, and possibly a forewarning of the stroke he was to suffer years later.) The next day, he reported he was “very tired” and had an earaehe. On the twenty-sixth, he was “better” hut his sleep had been disturbed by a very bad dream. He did not describe the dream, beyond saying he had been shouting.

  MIRIAM MOZES: After I got married, my husband noticed that I cried in my sleep. I had terrible dreams, and I cried so loudly, my husband had to wake me up to get me to stop.

  HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: The nights were especially bad. We would feel so frightened as if we were being persecuted.

  MENASHE LORINCZI: My wife told me I cried every night-I cried and shouted that people were trying to kill me.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: I have nightmares. My husband wakes me up and says, “Judith, Judith, you were shouting and crying in your sleep.”

  VERA BLAU: The children of the Holocaust did better than the adults.

  We did not realize the horror. We didn’t even have to work. There was nothing for us to do at Auschwitz except to play.

  After the war, I went through several stages. At first, I was very listless, very apathetic. I never cried.

  Then, I cried. I cried frantically. I could not stop crying.

  At the end of January 1962, there was a reprieve for a week. In one surprising entry during this period, Mengcle seemed positively joyous, describing in detail the splendid Brazilian summer. He noted the blossoming flowers outside his window-red hibiscus, yellow lilies, and geraniums over an expanse of green fields. By early February, Mengele felt well enough to spend several hours in the sun “reading poetry out loud.”

  But then the litany of complaints quickly resumed. Mengele was plagued, it would seem, by every possible discomfort, from headaches and insomnia to heart palpitations and dizzy spells. What probably contributed to his real and imagined ailments was an overwhelming sense of anxiety.

  The references to his physical and emotional symptoms are among the few intimate details the author of the voluminous diaries included in them.

  The bulk of the documents Dr. Mengele left behind were impersonal and mundane, containing exhaustive references to the most trivial details of his daily life. There are notes on the weather, the servants, the coffee he drank that morning, the fence he painted that afternoon. The contents of dozens of notebooks that supplemented the diary entries are equally banal. Literally hundreds of pages are devoted to discussions on the genetic traits of birds and monkeys, the composition of blood, and an occasional venture into philosophy. These documents, which Rolf inherited after Mengele’s death, were made available to a select number of German publications in 1985, and examined by scholars anxious for clues as to the Nazis’ thoughts abo
ut Auschwitz. But even a close reading of the material turns up no obvious references to Mengele’s time at the concentration camp. Rolf may well have discarded any material that cast his father in a bad light.

  But there is also the possibility that the Angel of Death couldn’t write about that period of his life, either from fear of being discovered or from a deeper desire to block out his own horrible past.

  PETER SOMOGYL: Those years after the camp, I did not think very much about Auschwitz: I wanted to wipe it out from my memory. It was not with me every day-I was able to block it out. For example, I never, ever talked about it with my twin brother. And so I was able to put the war behind me-perhaps because I never admitted my own feelings to myself JUDITH YAGUDAH: As the years passed, I tried not to think about Auschwitz at all. I pushed it back and tried to live in the present.

  I wanted to forget.

  But it was there, inside of me, like a heavy parcel I had to drag along all the time. I could not be happy.

  My mother was always sad. She constantly wore a tragic expression on her face.

  She wanted to talk about Ruthie. She would remember things long forgotten. She wanted to tell me about them, but I didn’t want to hear.

  TWINS’ FATHER: I tried to forget the Holocaust. I kept on telling myse If how lucky I was.

  I never talked about what happened with my family-not even with Magda.

  We never spoke about the loss of her little boy.

  We wanted simply to forget. My feeling was that what happened at Auschwitz was over and done with.

  Yet, there were times when I would get very depressed.

  OLGA GROSSMAN: As I see it now, having children really brought back memories. I spent nine months being afraid. I had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized after every childbirth.

  One of the doctors reminded me of Mengele. He was tall and wore a white coat-an image of Mengele.

  He ordered shock treatments. I felt I was reliving the horror.

  Instead of addressing the central episode of his life, Mengele filled his notebooks with lengthy critiques of books, which he ordered compulsively from Germany. In letters home, he included long lists of what he wanted to read, from the latest medical textbooks to treatises on genetics and natural science. He devoured complex works of philosophy, history, sociology, and the sciences. Spengler, Konrad, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, even the Jewish intellectuals Martin Buber and Hannah Arendt (herself a German war refugee), are cited in the journals and notebooks. It is far from certain that Mengele understood these books-only that he knew they were what a well-educated German ought to read.

  After perusing Camus’s The Fall, for example, Mengele decided it was terribly overrated. Its author, the renowned existentialist and Resistance fighter, was contemptible in Mengele’s eyes. The Auschwitz doctor decried the “pessimists” of the existentialist movement who were both

  “Nazi-haters and communists.” He delivered a blistering critique of The Fall, perhaps Camus’s greatest novel. The book tells the story of a powerful, arrogant lawyer who watches a woman drown one night and is forever haunted by the fact that he didn’t even try to save her.

  The lawyer’s failure to act at that critical moment destroys his self-image. He renounces his profession and spends his days in a sleazy bar, rehashing his sham life.

  But Josef Mengele, killer of thousands, could not conceive of feeling remorse for allowing one single woman to die. He did not even grasp the ironic parallels between the fate of Camus’s hero and his own dramatic fill the fact that he, too, was spending his life in a run-down hovel, rehashing the past.

  Throughout the mundane descriptions, the banal observations, Mengele’s journals betray an intense loneliness, a longing to return to Germany and what was left of his family. But his homesickness for Deutschland was always tempered by the bitterness he felt because his country had rejected him. “You have made it very difficult for some of your sons, holy Fatherland, but we will not desert you, and always, always love you,” he observed.

  Mengele’s isolation was relieved only by occasional visits from trusted friends. But since not many people knew of his Brazilian hideaway, these were few and far between. Mengele, always cautious, seems to have broken with the Nazi circles he had frequented in Buenos Aires and Paraguay. Narrowing his circle of friends probably kept him safe, but it also made his predicament all the more desperate and galling.

  He was apparently determined not to permit Eichmann’s fate to befall him.

  Mengele’s 1962 diary suggests mounting tension as the year wore on.

  The man who had whistled gay tunes amid the carnage of Auschwitz was unable to stand the isolation of his Brazilian hideaway. “Very bad headache” …

  “Very nervous …

  “Condition worsened . .

  Even reading, his favorite pastime, was an ordeal when he suffered from one of his migraines.

  Sometime later that year, the Stammers sold the property and moved to a farm closer to Sao Paulo. The new farm was in the town Serra Negra, and it, too, was purchased with the help of Mengele family money. From a perch atop the eight-foot tower he ordered, Mengele would anxiously watch the roads and fields, on the lookout for any unwanted visitors.

  His dogs were always close by him, barking and growling, wherever he went.

  MIRIAM MorES: When my daughter was little, and I took her for walks, I would get very frightened if we saw a dog. Since Auschwitz, I was terrified of dogs, and I passed this fear onto my child. She learned to think they were very dangerous.

  One day, my husband took her out, and he noticed how she jumped when she saw a dog. She behaved exactly like me. He told me,

  “This is not good. We have to get a dog for her to get over her fears.” I refused-and I continued to be afraid of dogs.

  I would dream dogs were barking at me, and pursuing me in the night.

  They were terrible dreams. I would cry so loudly that my husband and children would have to wake me up.

  Like a macabre parody of Proust, the gentle French novelist who spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined room recapturing his youth, Mengele’s only source of pleasure now came from remembrances of his part. One day on the radio, he heard an old German hymn, perhaps from his days as a churchgoing Catholic in Gtinzburg: “Great God, We Praise You.” He wrote in his diary, “[W]hat a nice memory. Another day, he read a book about Hungary and recalled his travels there as a young man. “A lot of old memories: pity that one did not get to know this country and the people better.”

  But whatever nostalgia Mengele may have felt for the Hungary of his youth, he began to treat the Hungarian couple he lived with poorly, subjecting them to ugly outbursts. The Stammers came to dread and fear their erratic “house guest.”

  Gitta’s husband was a sailor, frequently away at sea, and she was left alone for long periods with Mengele. She tried her best to create a pleasant atmosphere for him. An excellent cook, she would fix him his favorite dishes, chat with him, and even play the piano for his enjoyment. There were even rumors they were lovers. But instead of being grateful for her warmth and company, Mengele grew even more tyrannical, she later claimed in press interviews. He also became domineering and irascible toward the servants and other farm help.

  On one level, Mengele’s mistreatment of the Stammers reflected his disdain for Slavs, a people the Nazis had considered only slightly superior to the Jews. But his rudeness wasn’t only a reflection of his sense of social superiority. He had treated his Aryan wife Irene much the same way, ordering her about and subjecting her to his jealous diatribes. The pent-up rage Mengele had probably always felt was manifesting itself in his relationship with the Stammers. Although he was both lonely and deeply dependent on them for protection, Mengele still wanted to feel in control. The fact that his family’s money had paid for the farm gave Mengele economic power over them, power that he used indiscriminately. He even gave the Stammers advice if not absolute commands-on how they should bring up their young chil
dren: He told them they should be far stricter with them, and discipline them more often.

  Alienated from the Stammers, Mengele turned to his new friend, Wolfgang Gerhard, for friendship and support. Gerhard was Mengele’s only friend in his Brazilian retreat. Gerhard, who had lived in Brazil since the end of World War II, could advise Mengele on the country and its inhabitants. He was also as fanatic and dedicated a Nazi as Mengele.

  This was their most important bond, since aside from a shared devotion to Hitlerian ideals, the two men had little in common.

  The crude, lower-class Austrian was certainly not the type of person Mengele would have associated with back home. But in the wilderness of his South American exile, Mengele was glad for any friends he could get. Besides, the admiration verging on adoration that Gerhard lavished on him was salve for his battered ego.

  While still a teenager, Gerhard already a passionate devotee of Hitler, signed up for the German Navy. He named his oldest son Adolf, and long after the war had ended and he had left his beloved Austria, he continued to lament the loss of the glorious Third Reich.

  In his house were numerous souvenirs of the Hitler era, including medals and uniforms. Gerhard’s wife, Ruth, was almost as devout a Nazi as he. She once gave their Austrian landlady a gift: two bars of soap still in their original 1943 wrappers. They were

  “Jew soaps,” she’d said-made from the fat of Jews killed in the concentration camps.

  Another of the Gerhards’ prized possessions was the large swastika that topped their Christmas tree every year. “You always have to take good care of a swastika,” the old Austrian liked to say. Truly, Mengele could not have met a more ideal protector. For Gerhard, watching over Mengele was a labor of love.

  Although Gerhard had introduced Mengele as Peter Hochbichler, Swiss exile, sometime in 1963 Gitta Stammer realized his true identity.