Eye Wit
Page 10
Later that same month, using identification papers that showed him to be Fritz Ulmann, POW Mengele was released by the Americans. He moved to a small village near Rosenheim in Bavaria, where he worked as a farmhand under an assumed name until May of 1949. During those four years, he maintained contact with his wife and his friends.
Mengele had hoped to resume work as a research scientist but his only credentials resided in his name, and he knew the Allies would never let Dr. Josef Mengele, a presumed war criminal, resume his specialty. It was time to for the Angel of Death to flee, once again.
One of the friends with whom Mengele had remained in contact was his old friend Hans Sedlmeier. In 1949, Sedlmeier helped Mengele escape by ocean liner, first to Italy and then to Argentina, aided by ODESSA and using false identify and travel papers provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC provided false identities and travel papers to thousands of refugees after the war, including (inadvertently) Josef Mengele, Adolph Eichmann and several other top Nazis.
Mengele found Argentina—ruled by Juan Peron, who had supported the goals of the Third Reich—to be a most friendly country. Peron made a point of welcoming newly arrived Nazi expatriates. Mengele worked in construction at first, but soon made contact with other influential Germans, including Hans-Ulrich Rudel and Adolf Eichmann, and was able to maintain an affluent lifestyle in Buenos Aires, under a series of assumed names.
As the years passed, Mengele became increasingly paranoid of being captured by Nazi hunters, particularly after Adolf Eichmann was captured of by the Mossad in 1960. Mengele moved frequently within Argentina, then to Paraguay and finally to Brazil, under a succession of aliases: Fritz Hollmann, Helmut Gregor, G. Helmuth, José Mengele, Peter Hochbichler, Ludwig Gregor, Wolfgang Gerhard.
On February 7, 1979, Josef Mengele suffered a stroke while swimming in the ocean at Bertioga, Brazil, and drowned.
At long last, the Angel of Death—who led my grandmother, Luludji Krietzman, to her death at Auschwitz––was himself dead and buried. His headstone at Embu das Artes read: “Wolfgang Gerhard.”
Two years before his death, Mengele met his son, Rolf, for the first time. Later, Rolf Mengele described his visit with his father. He said he found an “unrepentant Nazi” who claimed he “had never personally harmed anyone in his whole life.”
Dr. Josef Mengele, a dissembling Nazi to the very end—a self-proclaimed “innocent”—lived as a free man for thirty years after the war. Never brought to trial, never forced to account for his crimes against humanity, Mengele escaped punishment for his unspeakable crimes. Yet, in the end, he had to be buried under another man’s headstone, which speaks loudly about what he knew of his innocence.
I do not know where my grandmother’s crystal ball on its copper base resided at the moment of Josef Mengele’s death, but I do know where it is now.
Luludji Krietzman’s crystal ball is displayed—proudly—on a fireplace mantle in the study of the townhouse of Marco Fellini in New York City.
21
Zoran’s comments about the missing arrows prompted Yoko to turn to Sophia Fellini and firmly explain that no one was to touch the display case until Forensics had examined it.
“They will be here shortly,” Yoko said.
“Very well,” The widow responded. “I’ll be in my yoga studio if anyone needs me.” She left the room and Yoko and Zoran walked down the stairs behind her and continued out the front door of the Fellini brownstone. Yoko paused to call Dan Riley, who was on his way to the precinct.
“Dan, you need to get Forensics back here to check the Ishi display case in Marco Fellini’s study. Zoran is convinced Ishi’s hunting arrows were used to kill Marco and wound Hans Reiniger, our Swiss balloonist, no doubt with intent to kill. Zoran believes they were taken from the case in Marco Fellini’s study for that purpose.”
“So Monk came through again, huh? I knew he would. I’ll bet he decides that Hans shot Marco with an arrow, then stabbed himself with another to commit suicide.”
Yoko glanced at Zoran, who was pacing in a small circle at the foot of the steps. “He hasn’t said who killed whom yet, but I see he’s working on that right now.”
“Let me guess. He’s strolling about aimlessly, stopping, staring off in space, then looking down at his feet or something, and walking some more. Am I right?”
“You nailed it, Dan. Tell me, am I that predictable too? ”
“Never, Yoko-san. You’ll always be a mystery to me. I never know what you’re thinking.”
“Oh, pooh,” Yoko said, at that moment recalling something she’d been meaning to talk about with Dan. A suspicion that had morphed into a full-blown conviction. “Maybe you’re right. But I’m remembering something related to what Iona Duncan mentioned when we were talking, about the vision training Marco Fellini insisted they get, to be better archers….”
“What is it, Yoko? Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“When Jessica Ware first showed up at the clinic…” Yoko paused, trying to remember. “About six or eight months ago, I think, I assisted Ebob with her vision exam….”
“Ebob? Is that a person or a thing?”
“Sorry. Dr. Robert Bertolli. He’s a practitioner in Connecticut. He’s always willing to help at the clinic when we’re short-staffed, you know how it is with vacations and that horrible summer flu. Everyone calls him Ebob. Anyway, I remember that Jessica’s eyes—her pupils, I mean—were very small, less that 3 millimeters in diameter, and were unresponsive to light.”
“You’re going to tell me what that means, yes?”
“Narcotics use, usually. If someone’s taking opiate painkillers, their eyes don’t dilate normally.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember. You’ve mentioned that before.”
“It might be nothing, Dan, but when she was at the clinic, I remember asking Jessica if she’d been taking any painkillers lately and she said she hadn’t.”
“So you think she might be a closet junkie on Percocet? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying that. It’s just that I only now remembered it and I thought it might be important.”
“Not to burst your bubble, Yoko-san, but I don’t see the relevance. If she was taking pain-killers six months ago, how does that relate to her boss getting harpooned?”
Yoko bit her tongue. Dan could be so literal sometimes. “It’s not her being on painkillers that’s suspicious Dan. It’s her not wanting to admit it. Why would she lie about that?”
“People lie all the time, Doc. For a whole buncha reasons. Mostly because they want to look better. Maybe she couldn’t make it through the day without a little chemical assistance, or maybe she’d bought some pills on the street and was afraid you’d ask to see her prescription. Who knows? Could be any number of things. People lie to their docs all the time, ya know. Take me, before I quit smoking. Every year at my physical, doc would ask me how much I smoked, and I always told him ‘less than half a pack a day, but I’m cutting down.’ Hell. I always said that, even if I’d just finished my third pack on my way to my appointment with the doc.”
Dan had a point, but Yoko wasn’t about to yield. “Still, I’m going to check it out.”
“You do that, Doc-san. Let me know what you find. Probably will turn out she killed Marco Fellini because he wouldn’t share the stash of Percocet he had hidden in a hollowed-out statue.”
“I’ll let you know, you naysayer you. When I find that stash, you’ll be the last to know.” Yoko had to smile, despite Dan’s pooh-poohing. He was probably right and Jessica’s lying didn’t mean anything but she never ignored her intuition, and Dan ought to have learned that by now. Maybe some day he’d get it.
“So why did you hustle back to the precinct, anyway? Anything we should know about?”
“The chief was expecting me back at the one-three with what I picked up from Dante at the morgue. I was supposed to go straight to the station from the morgue. Something Brian forgot to mention.”
“Yeah, right. Wouldn’t that be neat. Crashed his getaway balloon while trying to pick up Jessica and her stash of Percocets from the roof of your college. Ah, you’re gonna give Monk a run for his money, you’ve solved another convoluted case.”
Yoko heard Dan’s laughter trailing off as he closed up his phone.
22
I was seventeen when Dr. Josef Mengele died but did not know of his death until I was twenty-three.
On January 17, 1985, a group of survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau convened at the camp to memorialize family and friends who had perished in that infamous place of death. The following week, many of them reconvened in Jerusalem to try Josef Mengele in absentia, an event that received worldwide publicity.
Twenty-five years had passed since Adolf Eichmann had been captured in Argentina, but Josef Mengele had dropped off everyone’s radar. Mossad had come close to capturing Mengele on a few occasions in the early 1960s, but their pursuit of the infamous Angel of Death had faltered in response to the international uproar over the kidnapping and subsequent trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann, and the young Jewish nation had more pressing current events like the Seven Day War on its plate. Germany and the United States had apparently lost interest in bringing Nazi criminals to justice, despite the ongoing efforts of Simon Wiesenthal and other Nazi hunters.
All that changed in January of 1985, when television cameras broadcast Josef Mengele’s in-absentia trial world wide. For four days, survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau recounted the horrors Mengele had visited upon them. Like millions of others watching the proceedings, I was riveted to the screen and spent a small fortune on VHS tapes to record the entire trial, which I reviewed again and again, seeking more clues about my own Romani family and my extended family history.
In January 1985, I was just a few months from getting my degree from NYU in mathematics.
Exactly two days after the final broadcast of Mengele’s trial, I met my Brigitta, the watershed event in my life, the best thing that happened to me, before or since.
We met at the Cat Club, where Frankie Manning had invited me to play my fiddle for his dance classes.
Frankie had seen me the day before in Union Square Park, fiddling for spare change and the too-occasional dollar from passers-by. Not many of those on a cold Thursday afternoon before payday.
I wasn’t really playing for the money; I was trying to find some release from the anger I was feeling after four nights of watching Mengele’s trial. The only thing I had that would help me was my music, the happily frenetic strains of Gypsy polkas and mazurkas, the passionate longing of Romani waltzes, all of the dances sweet lullabies to me.
Despite the evidence of the empty violin case in front of me, Frankie Manning seemed to think I had talent. I didn’t, really. Just emotion, freshly scraped by watching hours of tearful testimony from Jerusalem.
“You play from the heart, man, but you need a better venue. You’re gonna freeze your tush off, you sit here much longer. I’m guessing you’d appreciate a paying gig,” Frankie said. “Come to the Cat Club tomorrow at three. I teach dance to some folk there a few times a week, and I could use a fiddler who can keep up with me.”
I’d gone to the Cat Club the next afternoon, not knowing what to expect. The name, Frankie Manning, seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
When I walked into the club a few minutes after three, the dance floor held a dozen or so students, all watching Frankie demonstrate his moves, keeping time with the only music in the place, the jazzy dah, dah, dee, dah riff he was vocalizing.
Manning was amazing to behold. I’d never seen a dancer so athletic, yet graceful and controlled. His feet were a blur, moving as rapidly as any Gypsy lavutari’s fingers. I pulled out my fiddle and picked up the melody, sawing and plucking as fast as I could.
“Hoo, boy. That’s the ticket. Yeah,” he said, “Keep her going!”
Manning bowed to a woman my age, grabbed her left hand and spun her around. They began to swing. Boy, did they swing. Quick steps pantomiming each other, pirouettes that should have made her dizzy but didn’t, a flip over his back that magically landed her on her feet, to her delighted surprise.
I couldn’t keep my eyes off them, especially her—a petite slip of a girl with features darker than Venus’ and a figure much better endowed. She was fully engaged in the music, her short dark hair tossing in perfect cadence with my playing, her totality much more exciting to watch.
She caught my eye. She smiled back and I was a goner, hopelessly smitten.
When they paused for a break, I walked over and politely introduced myself, and she returned the favor.
Then I said, “Will you marry me, Brigitta?”
“That depends,” she said, “Will you play like a Gypsy for me on our wedding night?”
“If you’ll dance like one.”
“Done,” she said. “Now tell me about the man I’m marrying.”
So I did, and even so, she still agreed to marry me. Mostly we talked about my heritage, and about Mengele’s in-absentia trial for his crimes against humanity, and specifically, his crimes against my people.
I told her about the trial from Jerusalem and how I had already known about Mengele’s role in my grandmother Luludji Krietzman’s death at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and about Luludji’s further connection to Josef Mengele: the experiments she had witnessed in his infirmary, and how she had sacrificed her fortune teller’s crystal ball to save two sets of twins.
I told her all of that, all those stories that had been vouchsafed to me by my parents, as they’d been vouchsafed to them by Andre and Mishka Domanoff: stories of how my grandmother had arranged my mother Luminitsa’s escape from the death camp at Majdanek as a new-born baby, stories told by those who helped her escape, my adoptive grandparents Andre and Mishka Domanoff.
I tried to convey how I had felt, listening to those Auschwitz survivors describe their experiences on TV, how hearing their stories had made even more vivid those stories I heard from my parents and adoptive grandparents.
Brigitta had seen only one broadcast of the Jerusalem trials, but she understood my feelings immediately.
“All those people saying the same thing,” she said. “Mengele going out of his way to meet all the new camp arrivals, resplendent in his uniform, his cap at a jaunty angle. Using his riding crop to direct new inmates one way or the other—to the left for the barracks, to the right for the ovens. Always wearing white gloves, joy on his face, a look of rapture when twins, especially Gypsy twins, appeared, so he could send them to those special barracks that housed the raw material for his medical experiments.”
She understood how all those things had been etched permanently on my brain. She not only sympathized with me and with my parents and adoptive grandparents; she knew why they had made sure I would know and understand where I had come from, so I would appreciate our proud and abused—yet unbowed—Romani heritage.
“So I would cherish the heroic blood that still flows in my veins,” I said.
She smiled. “Heroic, huh?”
“What can I say?” I said. “We Gypsies are a proud and poetic people.”
“Then I shall be proud to join your poetic people,” she said. “My own people are mostly gone now. My mother died four years ago of breast cancer, and my father of a stroke year before last. I was their only child, so I’m the last of my line. A cousin or two somewhere, but we’ve never been close.”
“Brigitta, I am so sorry. What did you do? Have you been on your own since your dad died?”
She nodded.
“How did you manage?”
“I found other families and latched onto them like a leech,” she said, grinning. “No, I’m kidding. It was tough—no, awful—to lose my parents, but I am pretty much over it now.
My mom and dad and I always had a good relationship. I think that makes it easier, don’t you?”
“I suppose, but I don’t know, thank God,” I said. “My Mama and Papa are still alive, in Lucerne. For a long time yet, I hope.”
“We will take good care of them, Hans. They will live long and prosper. But you asked how I survived. I was luckier than most kids, probably. Dad had insurance on mom and a lot on himself, so I could stay in our home in Groton until I could sell it for a good price and come here for school, which has always been my dream: to be in New York, to dance…” She grinned. “…to meet a Gypsy poet fiddler, to fall in love….”
As we got to know each other better, Brigitta became especially interested in hearing about my grandmother Luludji’s crystal ball and the role it had played in the survival of two sets of Romani twins from Bohemia-Moravia.
“Where’s the crystal ball now?” she wondered. “Was it still with Mengele when he was in South America? How can we find out?”
She vowed to help me find it and, if we managed that, to restore the priceless family heirloom to my family—my Romani clan, my immediate Romani family, soon to be her family as well.
Brigitta and I were married five months after we met: on the day after I received my degree. I cannot imagine why we waited so long. We must have been busy dancing and fiddling around.
I do know that both of us followed the events that occurred that spring, after Mengele’s show trial in Jerusalem. Millions of people all over the world had watched those four days of remembered horrors, and strong reactions were provoked.
More to the point, those strong reactions moved German authorities to act, with dispatch. Within a month, West German police raided Hans Sedlmeier’s home, finding numerous letters from Josef Mengele proving that Sedlmeier had aided Mengele’s flight from Germany to Argentina in 1949. They found other letters from other German expatriates who lived with Mengele in Brazil.