DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  Mengele’s first-and perhaps only-love, Irene Schoenbein, leads a similarly solitary existence in her native Freiburg. She divorced her second husband, Alfons Hackenjos, several years ago, and He has since died. But through the years, she has continued to speak well of Josef, and has admitted to a journalist or two that she had been deeply in love with him as a young girl. If she was ever troubled by his wartime activities, she never publicly revealed her misgivings. A car accident in the 1970s left her incapacitated and nearly homebound.

  She keeps to herself, choosing to live in a large, secluded house with a tall gate designed to keep out all nitruders.

  Rolf claims he felt strangely relieved after his father’s death. At last, Mengele’s son could begin to lead his OWn life, free of the constant emotional invectives and threats his father had made over the years.

  With Dr. Mengele lying in a grave thousands of kilometers away in South America, Rolf could even please and honor him in small ways.

  Every blond, blue-eyed child Almuth bore was like a tribute to his father.

  But as if on the whim of some prankish god, 1979, the year Mengele’s friends claim he died, was also the year when the public’s interest in finding him was most vigorously renewed. Everyone from professional Nazihunters and Holocaust survivors to members of Congress was suddenly expressing a passionate desire to see Mengele brought to book.

  Possibly as a result of the new interest in him, the Auschwitz Angel of Death was now spotted regularly in bustling Latin cities and dense jungles south of the Amazon. He was handsome and dashing as ever, witnesses said, as he shuttled around the triangle border area of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

  For years, Simon Wiesenthal and others had been pointing the finger at Paraguay. At around this time, Wiesenthal was joined by a new and dynamic breed of Nazi hunters, led by the husband-and-wife team of Serge and Beale Klarsfeld. Serge, a French Jew, and Beale, a German Gentile, didn’t just stop at condemning the South American dictator who harbored Nazis. They traveled to their countries and waged fiery demonstrations. The Klarsfelds, like Wiesenthal, insisted the regime of General Alfredo Stroessner was harboring the war criminal. As a result of the clamor, Congress joined the fray, urging the State Department to apply pressure on the Paraguayan government.

  Stroessner and his deputies had always maintained they knew nothing about Mengele’s whereabouts. But the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, Robert White, was inclined not to believe a regime that was one of the world’s worst human-rights violators. Convinced that the government that had once granted the Auschwitz doctor citizenship was protecting him still, White was certain that Mengele was living somewhere in the vicinity of Asuncion. He took to wandering alone through the German establishments of the capital in search of information, and sent regular cables to Washington detailing the progress of his “hunt.”

  In a surprise move that year, the Paraguayan government caved in to pressure and revoked Mengele’s citizenship-some two decades after granting it to him. It was a gesture clearly intended to appease critics of the Stroessner regime, particularly those in Washington.

  That same year, one of the strangest reports ever concerning Mengele arrived by way of the State Department’s secret channels. The embassy in Asuncion had learned, ostensibly from good sources, that Dr. Mengele would be flying to Miami, Florida, on a Delta Airlines flight.

  Although information was sketchy, reservations were found to have been made under his name. The bizarre report was taken seriously at the highest levels of the State and Justice Departments, and a major effort was launched to arrest Mengele when he landed. Classified cables flowed back and forth between Washington and Asuncion. The matter even reached the desk of then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. It was Vance who gave the orders to arrest Mengele when he arrived in Miami.

  But, of course, Josef Mengele never boarded the Delta flight. FBI agents who were poised to nab him at the Miami airport returned, empty-handed and disappointed, to their headquarters. They subsequently filed a report dismissing the incident as a probable hoax.

  But no one was ever able to explain the mysterious reservations made under Mengele’s name.

  “If I could get this man, then my soul would finally be at peace,”

  Simon Wiesenthal liked to tell friends and colleagues. He continued to tantalize the world with fantastic tales of the Auschwitz doctor. One day, Mengele would be spotted in a Mennonite community, deep in the heart of Paraguay. The next, he was in Bolivia, fraternizing with Klaus Barbie; the Angel of Death and the Butcher of Lyons were rumored to be on excellent terms. A priest spotted him on the Brazilian border. A Holocaust survivor swore she had seen Mengele shopping in her store in downtown Asuncion. Uruguay had asked him to train its police force. Stroessner had summoned him for expert medical advice.

  The CIA had reports he was involved in the international narcotics trade. He was rumored to be best friends with another missing Nazi, Martin Bormann. He was dying of cancer. He had just had a face-lift.

  He looked haggard and worn out from his years on the run.

  Mengele was seen here and there, everywhere and nowhere. The more Wiesenthal floated reports about Mengele’s supposed whereabouts, the more elusive the Angel of Death seemed to be.

  The 1980s brought a resurgence of interest in the Holocaust. In 1983, the first national conference for survivors in Washington attracted some fifteen thousand victims of Hitler’s death camps. They gathered to search for loved ones and friends and relive the horror.

  Many spoke for the first time about their experiences. They crowded around specially installed computer banks crammed with names of survivors hoping to find a longlost relative. The historic three-day reunion prompted an appearance by President Ronald Reagan, who made a moving speech about America’s responsibility to remember the Nazi slaughter of the Jews.

  Attending the gathering was Mengele’s child-victim Alex Dekel, who was in Washington to lobby members of Congress about Mengele.

  Obsessed with finding the war criminal, Dekel wanted the United States Congress to pressure Paraguay to turn over Mengele. But within weeks of the gathering, Alex died-and with him, it seemed, any resolve to capture the missing death-camp doctor.

  But the following year, Eva Mores, a surviving twin who had also been in Washington, earnestly took up Alex’s cause. She and her sister, Miriam, decided it was time the world should learn the story of the Auschwitz children. From her home in Terre Haute, Indiana, Eva sent letters to five hundred prominent American journalists and newspapers, urging them to write about the missing Auschwitz doctor and his child-victims, the twins. For months, she waited for a reply to her anxious requests. One day, her photocopied letter reached the desk of nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson. Anderson received thousands of letters a week, and often turned them over to his team of investigative reporters. Struck by the poignancy of Eva’s letter, Anderson associate Lucette Lagnado decided to contact the Indiana housewife. In the course of several emotional phone conversations, Eva told Lagnado of her childhood experiences as a surgical guinea pig, the brutal loss of her parents and sisters in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and life with Dr. Mengele.

  EVA MOZES: Over the years, I had had so many nightmares about Auschwitz. I was always thinking about Mengele, about the camp, about the other twins.

  I had read many of the books about Auschwitz, but to my great sorrow they never mentioned Mengele and the twins, except in passing.

  I had a very personal need to search for the twins. I wanted to understand what had been done to Miriam and me-to know why she was ill so often, why I had so many problems.

  I thought that maybe if I could locate the twins, we could sit down and piece together what had happened to us in the concentration camp.

  And then one day, it occurred to me that there was one person who knew exactly what was done to us-Dr. Mengele. I found out that Mengele had been free since the end of the war.

  I thought,

  “That is impossi
ble.”

  In Israel, Eva’s sister, Miriam, was equally intent on locating other twins. With the help of a relative who worked at Ma’Ariv, one of Israel’s leading dailies, Miriam placed a small ad asking any child survivors of Mengele’s experiments to contact her. Within days, she was flooded with calls and letters from twins longing to see each other again. A reunion was quickly arranged.

  HEDvAH STERN: I had been waiting for this moment-for someone to bring up what had happened. The wound was there, and it reopened.

  LEAN STERN: I kept crying-shouting and crying. “Why, why, why didn’t anyone do this before?” I blamed the world for the fact that no one had ever taken notice of us.

  MOSHE OFFER: There were so many of us still around-some had been hurt less, some were hurt more. I went to the reunion thinking that all the twins who underwent experiments at Mengele’s hands were suffering. And their children were suffering. And they would suffer for generations to come.

  We wanted to know what had been done to us. We felt the world should research the injections and surgeries we had undergone.

  ZYL THE SAILOR: I walked in thinking,

  “I should know half the people in this room.” A pair of twins immediately came up to me, and said hello.

  They told me,

  “How could we forget you-you and your brother were always fighting.” And one of them remembered not only my name, but my number-and even my twin’s number. I checked my arm, and sure enough, it was the same as he remembered.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: As the years passed, I had tried not to think about Auschwitz at all.

  I tried to push it back and live in the present.

  On the other hand, whenever a book about the Holocaust came out, I ran to get it.

  Auschwitz was in me-like a heavy parcel I had to drag around all the time.

  After the reunion, I felt very sad. I had a very hard week. I thought about Ruthie a lot. I talked with my mother about her. I told my children stories about her. I lit a candle for her.

  Buoyed by the discovery of nearly a hundred twin survivors, Eva and Miriam decided to form CANDLES, an organization whose sole purpose would be to publicize the plight of Mengele’s child victims.

  Parade magazine’s publication in September 1984 of Anderson’s feature story on the Auschwitz twins helped focus the spotlight on CANDLES.

  Thousands of readers around the United States sent contributions, and other journalists also were spurred to begin writing about the unusual group. The attention prompted Eva and Miriam to plan the most dramatic project ever undertaken by a group of survivors: a return to the death camp.

  In January 1985, CANDLES traveled to Auschwitz to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation from the Nazis.

  Led by the Mores sisters, twins from Israel and America braved once again the frigid Polish winter and their own demons for a walk through Auschwitz. Journalists from around the world descended on it to hear the forty-year-old story of the twins’ ordeal under the abominable Dr. Mengele. With tears and prayers, the twins toured the relics of the camp, anxious now to remember something of their terrible childhood past, the past they’d spent all their adult years trying to forget.

  MIRIAM MOZEs: It was very terrible to go back. I felt like I was going to a funeral.

  Auschwitz had been the last place I had seen my mother, my father, my older sisters.

  EVA MOZES: We walked to the spot where the twins’ barracks had stood.

  There was only the foundation left: We learned that the Poles had destroyed it and used it for firewood.

  But everything around the twins’ barracks was just as I remembered it.

  There was the watch tower! And here were the brick barracks that were used to warehouse the dead-just the same as when I had left it, forty years before.

  MENASHE LORINCZI: I decided to go to the crematorium by myself I left the group and walked inside. I started to read the psalms of David.

  I never cry-often, I have wanted to cry, but I could not. But there, in the crematorium, I found myself crying. I prayed, and then I cried.

  MIRIAM MOZES: When someone dies in the Jewish religion, it is very important to bury them quickly. You are then expected to “sit shivah”-to mourn them.

  But the mourning period is strictly limited.

  All these years, I never buried my parents. There was never any funeral. I never did anything in their memory, not even to say a memorial prayer.

  Instead, for years, I kept on mourning their loss.

  Oddly enough, I felt strangely free at Auschwitz. At last, I had found my mother’s resting place. I could speak to my mother there. It was the only place in the world I felt close to her. Our liberation had happened in 1945, but I felt personally liberated for the first time in 1985. I felt I could stop looking for my mother. I knew I had found her resting place.

  Finally, the twins retraced the Death March in which thousands of prisoners had trudged through the snow, just days before Soviet troops arrived. And as they marched, Mengele’s children began to sing-loud, boisterous Hebrew songs.

  EVA MorES: One of the reporters asked me,

  “Why are you singing?” I told him that I felt strangely upbeat. I had never walked through these grounds as a free human being. Forty years before, I had been a skinny kid, halfdead, an orphan. Then, we could have died like flies, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Now here I was, surrounded by the world press.

  Since the Holocaust, I had always felt that if only the world knew our story, it would care. At Auschwitz, surrounded by all those reporters, I felt, People do care.

  The whole time I was at Auschwitz, I had this wonderful feeling my mother was there also, listening to me, watching over me. If I could, I would go back to Auschwitz every year.

  After Auschwitz, the twins returned to Israel and held a mock trial of Dr. Mengele at Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the six million Jewish Holocaust victims. Nearly thirty twins and dwarfs testified before a sIx-man tribunal of world dignitaries. General Telford Taylor, whose team of Nuremberg prosecutors had let Mengele slip away, who had dismissed Mengele as dead, was on hand for the trial. And so was Gideon Hausner, who had successfully prosecuted Adolf Eichmann.

  Simon Wiesenthal, who had kept the memory of Mengele and so many other war criminals alive when the world would rather have forgotten, occupied a place of honor on the podium.

  Shyly, one by one, Mengele’s twins stepped up and, under the glare of the TV lights and cameras, told the world of their ordeal.

  Moshe Offer addressed the tribunal from behind a curtain. In a halting voice, he spoke of his brother Tibi’s ordeal under Dr. Mengele, the successive surgeries he had undergone, culminating in his barbaric castration and death. Zyl Spiegel, who had been known only as Twins’ Father, recounted his efforts to care for and protect the boy twins even as he feared Mengele’s wrath. When Spiegel’s presentation was over, all the boys who had been under his ministering rose to greet their Twins’ Father. A former nurse at Auschwitz recalled watching Mengele “sew” two twins together in an effort to make them Siamese. A pair of female dwarfs-also twin swept as they remembered being forced to perform naked in front of Mengele; before the war, they had been circus performers. How delighted Mengele had seemed when they were first brought to him! He had chuckled,

  “Now, I have work for twenty years.

  In the audience, dozens of twins from Israel, the United States, and around the world listened to the testimonies silently, intently, often tearfully, As for the Mengele family in Germany, if they followed the “trial” of the man they had successfully shielded all his life, they said not a word. Was Rolf Mengele shocked by Moshe Offer’s story of Mengele’s slaughter of his twin brother? Did Karl Heinz, in his office at the Mengele farm-equipment factory in Gunzburg, wince at the accounts of his stepfather’s mutilations and grotesque experiments?

  Did Dieter Mengele feel any shame? Did Irene? Did Martha? No available evidence suggests that they did. Indeed, none of the M
engeles, not his son, not his nephews, not his wives, have ever expressed any remorse or any wish to atone for the massive suffering inflicted by their notorious relative. Even Rolf, the most public of the Mengeles and supposedly the most contrite, has been ambiguous and contradictory in his statements.

  At the close of the historic three-day proceedings, the tribunal put out a statement Saying,

  “There exists a body of evidence justifying the committal for trial of the SS Haupsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” What Taylor and others had been unable to do at Nuremberg, they were attempting to do now.

  CANDLES’ pilgrimage to Auschwitz and trial of Mengele galvanized the moribund forty-year hunt for the war criminal. Until 1984, no government had cared enough about Mengele to launch a sustained effort to find him. But now, inspired by the twins’ stories of life in the Mengele barracks, governments and individual Nazihunters competed to find him. Large rewards were proffered for his capture. The West German government, which had done little to pursue Mengele since the 1964 Frankfurt trials, now offered $300,000 for any clues that might lead to him. In California, the Simon Wiesenthal Center posted a reward of $1 million, while in Washington the Washington Times newspaper promised another million dollars. In May, the Israeli government also put up $1 million. By the Spring of 1985, there was a price of nearly $4 million on Mengele’s head.

  Enticed by the promise of millions, fortune-hunters took off for the jungles of South America to search for Mengele. Camera crews and squads of television correspondents became a commonplace sight in the most remote parts of Paraguay and Brazil.

  The West German and Israeli governments-traditionally distrustful of each other-gingerly began to cooperate to find Mengele.