DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  The Hungarian Jews were the last intact Jewish community in Eastern Europe. Although formally allied with the Nazis, the Hungarian government had managed to shield its Jewish population for most of the war. But in 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and assigned Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, to oversee the deportation of the Jews to the death camps. As if to make up for lost time, the Nazis sought to destroy the Hungarian Jews with a vengeance.

  By the summer of 1944, nearly half a million of them had been deported to Auschwitz. In order to accommodate the accelerated extermination process, four crematoriums functioned around the clock.

  Mengele could be seen day and night at the head of the selection line, greeting the influx of new arrivals. Except for the twins, however, Mengele’s finger pointed in only one direction now: toward the gas chambers.

  PETER SOMOGYL: My family arrived from Hungary on one of the last transports to Auschwitz-maybe the very last one.

  We came from Pecs, a small town located several hundred kilometers from Budapest. We led a comfortable life before the war. My father was a representative for Ford Motor Company. He ran a business selling American cars, which were quite popular.

  My older sister, my twin brother, and I had a nanny. All three of us attended a Jewish elementary school. Our family was very religious.

  There was a flourishing Jewish community in Pecs in those days.

  Life was fine until 1944. The Nazis came to Pecs in March of that year, and everything changed. One antiSemitic decree after another was issued. First, we had to wear a yellow Star of David. Then, we were no longer allowed to attend school.

  In April, all the Jews of Pecs were rounded up and placed in a ghetto.

  We lived in this ghetto for about two months. Although it was very crowded, life was still not too bad. I can even remember a Boy Scout troop being formed inside the ghetto. We played regular games of soccer.

  No one knew what was going on, what was going to happen. But many people-including my mother-suspected and feared the worst.

  One day, the Nazis told us we were going to move. We would be “relocated “somewhere in Austria.” They were very vague. And they never, ever mentioned Poland-and certainly not Auschwitz.

  We were taken out of the ghetto and placed in a large stable-a place where before the war our horses had been kept. The Germans also brought trainloads of jews from other neighboring villages, and crammed them with us in this stable.

  The first week in July, all the Jews were marched down to the train station and placed in cattle cars. We were packed in so tightly we could hardly breathe.

  It took nearly four days to get to Auschwitz. Since this was the summer, it was extremely hot inside our car. We were given no food, no water. I remember a little boy crying incessantly for water.

  We arrived at Auschwitz on July 9, 1944. It was early in the evening, and when we stepped out of the cattle cars, we could see the chimneys, with very, very high flames leaping out from them.

  “What is this?” my brother and I asked our mother.

  “Oh, it’s probably just a big factory,” she told us.

  Unirmed guards walked up and down the selection line asking for twins.

  They asked for them both in German and Hungarian.

  But it wasn’t until the third time the guards asked that my mother admitted we were twins. The first two times, she kept silent. She didn’t know what it meant, whether it was good or bad. And because my brother and I didn’t look alike at all, it was easy for her to pretend we were not twins.

  My brother and I were quickly plucked out of the line. It was the last time I ever saw my mother or my sister.

  We were placed in an ambulance, and whisked off to the twins’ barracks.

  There, we were greeted by Zyl Spiegel, who told us he was the

  “Twins’ Father,” in charge of all the boy twins.

  We didn’t know what had happened to our mother, and so we asked him when we could see her. He hedged. He didn’t want to tell us yet what had happened, what was probably happening that very moment-that she had gone up in the flames.

  Mengele’s passion for selecting victims for the gas chambers, his cool efficiency and relish for the job, would earn him the sobriquet “the Angel of Death.” It is unclear bow the dandy from Gunzburg first acquired the title. The preponderance of evidence suggests he got the nickname after the war, as the public gained awareness of his heinous deeds. Was it coined by an anguished survivor, haunted by the memory of Mengele’s tender smile and ruthless acts? Or was it simply the product of some clever headline writer, invented when news of the Auschwitz doctor’s crimes first suit aced Whoever the author was, no Torah scholar or Hassidic grand rebbe, no mystic of the Cabala or Talmudic sage, could have envisioned a more perfect earthly incarnation of the evil spirit the Bible calls the Malach Hamavet than Dr. Josef Mengele of Auschwitz.

  The Angel of Death is a figure who appears throughout the Old Testament. By chilling coincidence, the biblical lore even states he assumed the form of a physician, one, moreover, “of excellent repute.”

  The ancient spiritual leader of Bratislava, Rabbi Nahman, once observed that “it was difficult for the Angel of Death to slay everyone, so He found doctors to assist him.” Terrifying, utterly without mercy or compassion, the Angel of Death visited the earth clothed in a doctor’s garb and cut an endless swath of destruction. “Even if the Almighty were to order me back upon earth to live my life all over again, I would refuse because of the horror of the Angel of Death,” said Rabbi Nahman-a view that many of Mengele’s victims would doubtless have shared.

  The bizarre, almost poetic title stuck because it captured so well the contradictions in Mengele’s character. Like the spirit Malach Hamavet, Mengele was a master destroyer, a Satanic figure brimming with evil and without regard for the value of a human life. But also like his namesake, Mengele was “angelic” in appearance and demeanor, able to charm, to woo, to captivate, to trick and seduce, everyone he met, most especially young children.

  PETER SOMOGYL: When we first met Dr. Mengele, my brother and I noticed he was whistling. Both of us had studied classical music in Hungary, and we recognized the tune as a work of Mozart. We told this to Mengele.

  He was absolutely delighted. It made for an instant rapport. We could also speak German fluently, and Mengele seemed very pleased with that, as well.

  We became Mengele’s special proteges. He nicknamed us “the members of the intelligentsia.”

  Mengele related to the twins on diflerent levels. With my brother and me, he liked to discuss music. We had long talks with him about culture. Perhaps because of this, we were not afraid of the experiments-or of him.

  Once or twice, he took us to his office. There, he measured us, weighed us. He checked the size of our heads, of our eyes. He did this very gently.

  I remember thinking Mengele was rather a nice man.

  The massive number of Hungarian transports sent many more guinea pigs Mengele’s way. Although the twins were from the start the focus of Mengele’s work at Auschwitz, like every other SS doctor there he had his share of routine duties, such as signing death certificates and making sure outbreaks of contagious maladies like TB and cholera did not get out of hand.

  Occasionally, to relieve the tedium, Mengele would demand a show of the new arrivals. One especially hot July day, a group of Hungarian rabbis descended from the cattle car. Despite the stifling heat, they were still wearing their traditional garb long black coats, black woolen trousers, and fur hats. Mengele looked them up and down with contempt, then decided to amuse himself before motioning them to the gas chambers. First, he ordered the rabbis to step out of the selection line and sing. The holy men obeyed without a word of protest. Then, Mengele commanded them to dance. He wanted them to raise their arms and their voices toward the God who would not save them, no matter how loud their prayers.

  And so the Hungarian rabbis began to dance, slowly, ponderously, under the sweltering sun
of Auschwitz. They held their heads high, determined to preserve their dignity. With their eyes fixed to the sky, the rabbis chanted the

  “Kol Nidre,” the mournful hymn of atonement, while Josef Mengele listened, unrepentant.

  Mengele’s zeal for his work clearly impressed his superiors, who showered him with accolades that terrible summer. He was now at the height of his powers. As chief doctor of Birkenau, the huge extermination center next to Auschwitz, he presided over a doomed population of Gypsies, twins, and several thousand female inmates.

  Although there were Nazis at Auschwitz who held higher ranks, none was as hated, or as feared, as Dr. Josef Mengele.

  In the terrible summer of 1944, Birkenau was also crammed with hordes of newly arrived Hungarian women. Because of the stepped up number of transports, even Nazi efficiency was proving inadequate to the task of slaughtering all the Jews who kept arriving. Each day, hundreds of Hungarian women were herded into Birkenau. There was simply no time to put these women through the normal selection process as they got off the trains, or even to assign them a number, and Mengele was obliged to perform the selections later, inside the women’s camp.

  Mengele was frequently accompanied during these inspections by a beautiful young German guard, Irma Grese. The

  “Blond Angel,” as she was called, and the elegant Dr. Mengele made a splendid couple. Both were renowned around the camp for their beauty and sadism. Only eighteen, Irma loved to parade in her finery-clothes looted from the trunks of Jewish women. She gloated over the inmates who were forced by circumstance to be at her mercy. She cracked her leather whip on the helpless women like some Hollywood parody of a female SS guard. To Mengele, of course, she was utterly deferential.

  The women of Birkenau both feared and admired Mengele. Much as they loathed to admit it, several of his female victims actually found him attractive. As he inspected them, some intuitively resorted to preening gestures of a time gone by, patting what was left of their hair, straightening their tattered camp uniforms, and attempting a smile.

  Clearly, many of these poor women were merely using their sexuality in a desperate effort to save themselves. But despite their physical frailty and emotional anguish, some were not immune to Mengele’s sexual magnetism.

  Mengele seemed as at ease with the adult women of Birkenau as he was with the twins, and all the more confident of his own attractiveness.

  To this day, survivors note the extreme care he took with his appearance-his uniform, exquisitely tailored and perfectly pressed; his cap, so carefully angled on the head; and his white gloves, which he wore even while making selections. Indeed, to these forlorn women, destined to die, Mengele seemed almost a romantic figure.

  Back in Gunzburg, he had exuded charisma as he strode through town with his brisk, energetic walk and the slight smile that never left his face. There, he could have his pick of all the town belles.

  And the same was grotesquely true in the concentration camp. Here,, too, Beppo Mengele could select any woman he pleased-as his next victim.

  As part of the selections Mengele conducted inside Birkenau, women were required to undress and parade naked in front of him.

  This enabled him to judge whether they were fit to live just a little bit longer. Much as he was able to convince the young twins to like and trust him, Mengele intuitively knew the secret of making these female inmates feel at ease. Several of the women on parade would confide in him, admitting, in response to his questioning, that they were not feeling well, or suffered from some chronic ailment. What these women did not realize was that by trusting the handsome young doctor, and revealing to him their weaknesses and maladies, they were only hastening their own deaths.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: When Mengele made the selections inside Birkenau, the women were not sent immediately to the gas chambers. They were first taken to another compound, not far from the twins’ barracks.

  These poor women knew they were going to be killed, and so they were constantly shouting and crying.

  I would see big open trucks filled with naked women who were obviously destined for the gas chambers.

  It was an awful, awful sight.

  Once in a while, Mengele seemed to be drawn physically to one of the Jewish inmates, in spite of the efforts of their Nazi captors to strip them of their beauty. Shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, women were herded into Hitler’s version of a “beauty parlor,” where their heads were shaved. The women were then given either a regulation striped uniform or absurd, ill-fitting rags to wear. Their shoes were usually too large or too small, often consisting of a “pair” of one flat slipper and one high heel. The effect was to make the women look ridiculous and thoroughly un alluring to everyone-including their Aryan guards.

  Occasionally, the Nazi system failed, and a woman radiated beauty, her shapeless garments and shorn hair notwithstanding. Mengele encountered such a woman in lbi Hillman. Tall, blond, and statuesque, fifteen-year-old Ibi had been the pride of her small village in Transylvania. When Ibi removed her uniform in the course of an “inspection,” Mengele found himself staring at her, transfixed. The other female inmates, and even his own assistants, watched him, aware of his attraction to the young Jewish woman. Any other SS officer would have simply made her his mistress. But Mengele evidently could not and would not concede feeling an attraction toward a Jew. In a loud voice, he dispatched Ibi to the infamous Block Ten, where the Nazis were performing sinister gynecological experiments. Few women survived Block Ten.

  A few weeks later, Ibi was spotted by some inmates wandering by herself, in a daze. They hardly recognized her. The beautiful young girl looked like a shriveled old woman. Her slender limbs were now swollen and disfigured, while her stomach was bloated from the numerous surgeries that had been performed on her. Sickly and grotesque, Ibi Hillman no longer held any possible attraction-for Dr. Mengele or any other male.

  Mengele also seemed to take a perverse pleasure in exterminating women who were pregnant. “This is not a maternity ward,” he replied easily, when asked why these women were sometimes automatically sent to die.

  Mengele even boasted he was being “humanitarian In having these women killed. Auschwitz, he would point out, had no facilities to take care of newborn children. But Mengele fluctuated erratically in his policy.

  Some weeks, he issued orders that pregnant women were to be kept alive and given every consideration. Other weeks, he ordered them killed immediately. At times, Mengele permitted a woman to deliver her baby, but then he promptly dispatched mother and infant to the gas chambers.

  Even by Auschwitz standards, Mengele’s obsessive cruelty to pregnant women stood out. When he first met an expectant inmate, Mengele liked to quiz her at length about her condition. He asked dozens of precise, detailed questions that allowed him to assume the protective coloration of a concerned physician. But the questions were often more personal than scientific, more voyeuristic than impartial. When did she become pregnant, he wanted to know, before or after arriving at Auschwitz? By whom? In what circumstances was the child conceived? In posing the questions, Mengele would try to maintain his usual detachment, but the intensity of his curiosity seemed odd both to the unfortunate women he addressed and to the assistants who overheard such exchanges.

  Pregnancy, after all, was an everyday occurrence. And unlike twins, triplets, dwarfs, or giants, pregnant women could hardly be deemed a scientific phenomenon.

  MAGDA SPIEGEL: Pregnant women were always coming to Mengele’s office.

  He wanted to be present at the birth of their children-he wanted to be present during each and every birth at Auschwitz.

  There were red-brick ovens in the middle of the barracks. The women were forced to give birth on these ovens: That was where Mengele “delivered” the babies. These poor women were given nothing, no pillows, no blankets.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: If a woman was pregnant, or even if Mengele simply thought she was pregnant, he sent her immediately to the gas chambers.

  My aunt, my mo
ther’s sister, was a bit overweight. She had a stomach.

  Mengele was convinced she was pregnant, and so he sent her to be gassed.

  Mengele’s Jewish assistants, like Dr. Gisella Perl, took to performing abortions just to save the lives of women who faced automatic death if their pregnancies were discovered. In an effort to rescue as many of these women as possible, Perl secretly performed crude abortions. When a pregnancy was too advanced, she would deliver the baby, then kill it with an injection of phenol, telling the mother her baby had been born dead.

  Perl, who worked closely with Mengele, came to know him well and to despise him. In I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, a searing account of her experiences at the concentration camp written shortly after the war, Perl described Mengele as a supreme sadist who lorded his power over the frailest subjects of Auschwitz’s kingdom of Death: the pregnant women and their newborn children, the deformed hunchbacks and freakish giants, the dwarfs and midgets. Mengele was “so proud of his index finger which could distribute life or death at will, of his attractive, elegant physique … [of his sham-medical profession.” Perl wrote with emotion. The people who caught Mengele’s eye, she pointed out, were life’s most vulnerable.

  As chief doctor of Birkenau, Mengele was also in charge of the Gypsy camp. Located near the twins’ barracks, it was unique in the death camp, where the rule was to separate family members the moment they arrived. The Gypsies were allowed to stay together, perhaps because they were faithful Christians, despite their inferior racial stock.

  It was their one privilege.

  Several thousand Gypsies were crowded into one encampment, whose borders were grimly defined by the crematoriums. At any time of the day or night, they could look up and see the blood-red smoke pouring out of the chimneys, or the Sonderkommandos pushing streams of people to their deaths. Because of the overcrowding, insufficient food, and poor sanitary conditions, epidemics ravaged the Gypsy population.