Lucette Matalon Lagnado - Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz

Children of the Flames by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel

Penguin USA

ISBN: 0140169318

Paperback Reprint edition (May 1992) Preface.

CANDLES IN THE NIGHT.

In the winter of 1984, I was asked by Parade magazine to seek out the longlost child survivors of Dr. Josef Mengeles experiments at Auschwitz during World War II. Of the estimated three thousand twins-most of them young children-who had passed through Mengeles laboratories between 1943 and 1944, only about a hundred were known to have survived. Many fewer were thought to be still alive when I undertook my search for them in America and Israel.

I was aided in this effort by Eva and Miriam Mores, twin sisters who had undergone painful experiments at Mengeles hands. Eva, an American housewife living in Terre Haute, Indiana, had long believed the twins ordeal, which had received no more than a passing reference in the history of the Holocaust, should be told. Determined to reunite all the surviving twins, Eva and her sister had just founded an international society of Auschwitz twins-CANDLES-an acronym for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Laboratory Experiments Survivors.

Through this group, the twins hoped to piece together what had been done to them in Mengeles laboratory. For unlike other death-camp survivors, these child victims had kept totally silent about their past. Ridden with guilt and with shame, most had never breathed a word about their ordeal as guinea pigs of the notorious Dr. Mengele, not even to loved ones. Theirs was the untold story of the Holocaust.

A few well-placed ads in Israeli newspapers yielded gratifying results.

Within days, dozens of twin survivors (most of whom had ended up in Israel after the war) came forward to join CANDLES. In tearful reunions, they reforged the bond that had helped them survive both the death camp and Mengeles demonic experiments. All were united in their fierce desire to see the war criminal brought to justice.

I arrived in Israel in March to begin my interviews with Mengeles twins.

Although, thanks to CANDLES burgeoning membership rolls, tracking down their names and addresses was relatively simple, arranging actual meetings with them was considerably more difficult. Only at the gentle prodding of Miriam and Eva did a number of twins agree to see me. Each session began with the whispered confession,

I have never spoken of this to anyone.

But for many of the twins, simply telling what happened to them proved to be a release. Middle-aged, they spoke with the candor, intensity, and strange eloquence of the very young. In talking with me, many even reverted to the mannerisms of childhood-losing their adult composure as they related searing memories of camp life. One woman, recalling the rats scurrying across her toes at night as she tried to sleep in the hard wooden stall that was her bed, shook and shivered like a little girl. A male twin winced and whimpered like a child while telling of a painful injection Mengele had given him. But then his face lit up with a boyish grin as he described the delicious candy the doctor offered him moments after. They seemed in many ways to still be the frightened eight-or ten-year-olds of yesteryear, listening for the sound of Dr. Mengeles footsteps, dreading the arrival of the trucks that would take them to his laboratory. They wept as the memories came flooding back.

Profoundly moved by their stories, I often found myself crying with them.

Only a handful of the twins were able to provide me with a complete account of their lives from the period before the war through the years after Auschwitz. Instead, most seemed obsessed by one period or another. Some vividly remembered Mengeles experiments, volunteering precise details on the blood tests, injections, X rays, and surgeries they had undergone. Others focused on the SS doctor himself-his visits to their barracks, how he liked to sit and chat with them. A few of the twins insisted they had no memories of Auschwitz whatsoever.

Instead, they dwelt on the sadness of their postwar adult lives-their emotional upheavals, physical breakdowns, and longings for the dead parents they had hardly known. The younger they were at Auschwitz and the less they consciously remembered, the greater their turmoil as adults: That was the rule.

Mengeles passion for selecting Jews for the gas chambers of Auschwitz had earned him the title the Angel of Death. With a flick of the wrist, he would consign thousands to die. Among the few exceptions were the young twins he plucked out from the selection lines for use in his research. As a genetic scientist, Mengele hoped to produce a master race of blond, blue-eyed Aryans.

Twins were the key. What better way to test out theories on heredity than by experimenting on hereditys perfect genetic specimens: identical twins.

Most of the twins began their descent into Auschwitz by witnessing their entire families being led away from them to be killed. In their special barracks, located just yards away from the crematoriums, they observed the Nazis extermination of the Jews at close range. Twins as young as five and six years of age endured torture, daily blood tests, and starvation diets, as well as facing exposure to epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis, and other deadly diseases that were rampant because of unsanitary conditions. Worst of all, of course, were Mengeles barbaric pseudoscientific experiments. But horrific as their lives were, the twins enjoyed a special privileged status, for they were regarded as

Mengeles children. And as such, they were spared the random selections and march to the gas chambers that threatened every other Auschwitz inmate.

Despite their ordeal, many of them clung to their childlike faith in life.

During Mengeles mandated recreation periods, male twins played soccer under a sky made brighter by the flames pouring out of the crematoriums.

Little girls were taken to fields on the outskirts of the camp, where they picked bunches of wildflowers.

Some of the children even grew to like Mengele, substituting him for the father they had lost. Uncle Mengele, as they called him, delighted them with candy, joked with them, hugged and kissed them.

Some were persuaded that at the bottom of his evil heart was a soul spot-an untapped core of goodness-reserved especially for his twins.

I believe Josef Mengele loved little children, Vera Blau, a twin from Tel Aviv, insisted to me during our first interview. Yes! Even though he was a murderer and a killer.

In writing this book, Mengeles special relationship with children emerged as the most puzzling-and fascinating-aspect of this angel of death. Monstrous as he was, Mengele still managed throughout his life to charm and beguile youngsters. The bizarre, mysterious bond forged between Mengele and his twins at Auschwitz remained long after they had parted company.

However hard they tried, none could banish the memories of the handsome young doctor who had tortured and-they thought, loved them.

I was not alone in being touched and inspired by the twins stories of their life under the abominable Dr. Mengele. My article

The Twins of Auschwitz Today, which appeared on the cover of Parade that September, was reprinted in newspapers in several countries, and prompted an outpouring of response from readers around the world. Thousands called for renewed efforts to hunt Dr. Mengele. In November of 1984, former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Nazihunter Beale Klarsfeld, both prominent in the battle to track down and prosecute Nazi war criminals, invited me to accompany their delegation to Paraguay as an observer in the search for Mengele.

The four-member delegation, which included Bishop Rene Valero of the Brooklyn Catholic Diocese and Menachem Rosensalt, the child of Holocaust survivors, confronted the regime of General Alfredo Stroessner for information on the war criminal. Stroessner had once granted Mengele Paraguayan citizenship, and he was long believed to be sheltering the SS doctor. If Holtzmans mission failed to pressure the old dictator, it did for the first time awaken the United States governments interest in locating Josef Mengele.