DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  Elsewhere, Andreas sadly observes that “with the Third Reich, my marriage also ended.” What Josef failed to see was that not only his marriage but also the life he had dreamed of effectively ended with the fall of Hitler. The Mengele family remained loyal to Josef and to his version of events. Mengele’s father and brothers steadfastly refused to believe the stories that were being told about their beloved Beppo.

  They closed ranks behind Mengele out of a combination of familial duty and genuine affection for the man they had known only as genial, carefree, and utterly endearing. But his family’s loyalty and concern could only help Mengele survive in obscurity. His hopes for a brilliant future were dashed.

  In a bizarre fashion, Auschwitz had damned Dr. Mengele almost as much as it had the poor Jews he had slaughtered. Mingled with the remains of the innocent men, women, and children he had dispatched to the crematorium were the ashes of his own ambitions. In destroying them, he had destroyed himself. Yet even now, he did not realize that he would never lead the honorable life he had hoped for, never enjoy the respect he believed he deserved.

  He could not see that his life was Over: that the postwar world would have no place for old die-hard Nazis. Although he was a war criminal wanted by several countries for mass murder, in between his bouts of despair, he kept hoping he would be called back into the world of academia. It is ironic that this devotee of Darwin failed to heed the master’s central lesson: Only those who adapt to change survive.

  The years at the Fischer farm passed slowly. Mengele’s tedium was relieved only by the visits of family members, or furtive trips to Autenried to see his wife and young son. Lonely and restless, Mengele decided he was tired of being a farmhand and fugitive, and that he needed a change of life. He had heard that Nazis were honored and respected citizens in some South American countries, especially Argentina. The Argentine strongman Juan Peron was known to be a great admirer of Hitler’s Reich. A new future beckoned.

  ZYL THE SAILOR: An underground Jewish organization arranged for my twin brother and me to escape to Palestine. We sailed on a ship manned by Jewish soldiers of the British Army. It was a very small ship, and there were hundreds of Jews on it. The British did not want any more Jewish refugees in Palestine. Our boat was stuck in the port of Haifa for two months.

  Finally, they let us disembark. It was the last ship of Jews the British allowed into Palestine before they began sending the refugees to Cyprus instead.

  ALEX DEKEL: I learned that we had been intercepted by two British warships that insisted upon escorting their ship to Cyprus. If the captain refused, they threatened to open fire. In Cyprus, we were treated decently, fed, and given medical attention. One day, a young man, hardly much older than I, spoke to me and told me he was a member of the Haganah.

  He whispered that I should be prepared to escape from Cyprus that night. The Haganah had been secretly smuggling physicians and young men out of the camps and smuggling them into Palestine. Around 3:00 A.M. he woke me and whispered that we should now make a run for it; we had to reach a motor launch that lay off the beach about a mile down the coastline from the encampment. I was to leave my belongings and never look back. I ran for my life in that darkness of the early morning.

  But there was no gunfire. The British didn’t know of our plans and departure. I slipped through an opening that had been cut through the wire fencing surrounding the camp. It reminded me of the other fences-electrified-at Auschwitz. I ran along the beach and tried not to remember the many people I had seen deliberately reaching for that other camp’s fence, instantly ending their existence.

  Some miles off the coast of Palestine, all of us transferred to a flotilla of small rubber rafts, to escape detection by the British. We rowed these to within half a mile of land, took off our clothes, and swam the rest of the way. Exhausted, I collapsed onto the beach without papers, belongings, and clad only in soaked undershorts. But I was home.

  I was officially accepted into the Haganah, and it was this event that made my survival at Auschwitz worthwhile. Now I had a purpose in life again; a State to be settled, fought for, cherished.

  EVA MOZES: In May 1948, Israel became a country. What a wonderful feeling! I said to myself,

  “I wish my parents could have lived to see this.”

  A Jewish state had only been a vague dream for them. My father had been an ardent Zionist, but he had talked about a Jewish homeland as if it were a fantasy that could never come true.

  At the same time, life in Romania was becoming so difficult, we decided to try to emigrate to Israel. We applied for visas.

  But the Israeli government would only grant my sister and [me] the necessary papers-they didn’t want to give visas to my aging aunt and uncle. And the Romanian government didn’t want to let Miriam and [me] out-althongh they were perfectly prepared to let my aunt and uncle leave. Young people are always in demand. Old people, nobody wants.

  But Miriam and I did not want to be separated from our only living relatives. By now, we considered ourselves a family.

  LEA LORINCZI: The Communists did not want me to leave Romania. They called me to their party office and said,

  “Why do you want to go to Palestine?

  You can stay here and you can be anything you want to be.”

  They promised me the world-a brilliant future under the Communist leadership. But my father, his new bride, and my twin brother, Menashe, were determined to move to Israel.

  I told the Communists,

  “After what I went through, I would never live apart from my family-never, never.

  Although his marriage had collapsed, Mengele still expected his wife and son to accompany him to South America. The man who had always been obsessed with the trappings of success, with style over substance, evidently could not bear to think he had failed as a husband.

  He chose instead to speculate that Irene secretly believed the stories circulating about his actions in the war. “There are people in her circle of acquaintances who wish to convince her of my guilt,” Andreas says of his wife in the fictionalized memoirs. “We must get through the present and start over abroad.”

  But Irene was apparently motivated by other considerations than whether or not her husband was a mass murderer. As much as she hated Gunzburg, she knew Argentina would have even less to offer.

  For the cosmopolitan Irene, who in her youth had treasured visits to Paris and Florence, the notion of residing so far away from her beloved Europe was simply unthinkable. The professor’s daughter craved a cultured society she doubted would be available to her in South America. She categorically refused to accompany her husband, and began instead to plan her own return to her native Freiburg.

  Mengele was floored by Irene’s adamant refusal to move, and tried repeatedly to convince her to change her mind. In the novel, Andreas expressed shock and dismay over lrmgard’s insistent demands for a divorce that would allow her to rebuild her life. “Man, woman, and child are a unit that one must not destroy,” he sternly observes. The admonition falls on deaf ears-Irene’s as well as Irmgard’s.

  But even the prospect of a solitary life was not enough to deter Mengele from leaving Germany. He missed his work and hoped that in Argentina he could resume his scientific career-perhaps even continue the research on twins. He had apparently not forgotten his children of Auschwitz. His first concern was getting out of the country without being caught.

  PETER SOMOGYL: As we became more involved in the Zionist movement, my brother and I decided we had to move to Israel. Since there was no way of leaving Hungary legally, we decided to escape. We would sneak out with our Zionist group.

  To plan his escape, Mengele turned as always to his family for help.

  He bid good-bye to the Fischers, thanking them for their hospitality these many years. At least one member of the family was deeply relieved. According to an interview he gave years after the war had ended, Alois, the farmer’s brother who had never liked or trusted Mengele, was glad the Nazi was going to look
for another hideout.

  In 1948, Mengele returned to Gunzburg to plan his getaway. But instead of being allowed to live in the family villa, he was reduced to spending several months hiding out in the woods near the old town.

  His family gave him whatever he needed to be comfortable, even as they arranged his safe exit from Germany. Although they loved their Beppo, the Mengeles saw the need of getting him speedily out of the country.

  They, too, could do without the tension and danger of harboring a war criminal.

  Mengele needed identity papers, yet despite their wealth and influence, the Mengeles didn’t have easy access to forged documents.

  Irene finally managed to get her husband a passport on the black market, but it was of such poor quality that it was quickly discarded.

  Mengele had nO choice but to try to undertake the journey without any papers.

  PETER SOMOGYL: My twin and I fled Hungary with the Zionist movement on April 4, 1949.

  Our flight was very well organized. There were about ten young people in our group, as well as a few parents. We had guides at every stage of our journey. These guides had been well-paid. In those days, there were a lot of people who made their living sneaking people out of Europe.

  The border guards had been bribed, so we were able to cross without any problems. But instead of going directly south, we went up north through Czechoslovakia, and then on to Vienna.

  In Vienna, we had to bribe Russian soldiers to pass through. The city was then under Russian control. We stayed in an old schoolhouse, where we were joined by scores of other Jews trying to flee.

  We spent three weeks in Vienna, and then made our way to Salzburg. In Salzburg, we stayed in an old concentration camp, I don’t know which one. I didn’t care-and surprisingly, I didn’t feel particularly bothered by that. We didn’t spend too much time there.

  After about a week, we went to Ban, in southern Italy. There, it was very easy to move around: Everyone accepted bribes. They let us go through even though not one of us had passports.

  We waited for the boat that was to take us to Israel. There were hundreds of us by then, gathered from every corner of Europe awaiting passage to the Promised land.

  We were all very excited. We felt for the first time that we didn’t have to look behind our back and hear someone saying “dirty Jew.”

  Mengele hired several guides to help him with his escape. He began by taking a train to lnnsbruck. Once there, he went to the Brenner Pass, a route that led into Italy through the Alps. He reached the border that divides Austria and Italy on Easter Sunday, 1949. A guide helped him across the mountainous terrain, and the two made the crossing in the dead of night. In Mengele’s thinly disguised account of his flight from Germany, he describes the difficulty of the crossing.

  His paid companion, noticing he is huffing and puffing, asks if he is strong enough to continue on foot. The hero, somewhat mortified, replies that he is in “top physical shape.”

  Mengele’s novel provides a surreal, even poetic rendition of the flight, from a description of the moon in its first quarter to the edelweiss and primroses dotting the Alps. Throughout his account of Andreas’s life, Mengele veers from the dry and factual rendition of events to long passages in which the hero’s sensitive and artistic sensibilities are paraded. Even at Auschwitz, the SS doctor had loved to show off his cultured side, whistling the tunes of the great composers as he sent inmates to the gas chambers. Perhaps to refute his monstrous postwar image, Mengele’s writings always highlighted his appreciation of beauty, music, and art. It is almost as if he anticipated his reader critics of the future, and wanted to reveal his “true” nature.

  Once Andreas is near the border, his guide leaves him to fend for himself. He continues walking until he reaches Italy, and boards a train to Sterzing, where another guide is to meet him. With time on his hands, he checks into the Golden Cross Inn and nervously awaits his contact. He keeps glancing around for any suspicious characters who might be tailing him, and is especially afraid of running into Americans. But everything goes as planned, and an Italian with the code name

  “Nino” arrives to meet him.

  The fugitive spends approximately one month at the Golden Cross Inn.

  Yet another contact comes to take his photograph, and returns with an expertly forged German ID card. Armed with this document, Andreas can now proceed safely to his next stop, Genoa, where he will try to get the additional papers he needs to leave Europe.

  In writing the “novel” of his escape, Mengele certainly had literary pretensions, but the only evidence of artfulness would appear to be his change of place names and individuals. Historians who have tracked the war criminal’s path out of Europe found that Mengele did indeed acquire an ID card from a town in the South Tyrol called Taormino.

  The document was made out to

  “Helmut Gregor,” a pseudonym Mengele would use for years to come.

  The Tyrol, located between Austria and Italy, had a heavily Germanic population. It had long been a point of contention between Italy and Germany. When Italy fell to the Nazis in 1943, the Germans moved in and promptly issued their own identity cards. But after the war, inhabitants of the Tyrol were designated as “stateless” by the International Red Cross because of the unresolved dispute over sovereignty. The confusion was beneficial to Metigele, who was able to obtain an International Red Cross ID card very easily. Thanks to this card, he would later be able to obtain the Swiss passport that would enable him to leave Europe and enter South America safely and legally.

  HEDVAH AND LEAK STERN: When we left Eastern Europe for Palestine, we went from one war to another war, from the Nazis and the Communists straight into the arms of the Arabs.

  We sailed to Haifa from Marseilles in 1948. But when we arrived, we couldn’t get in because of the war. And so we were forced to sail all around Egypt, to Alexandria and Cairo.

  In Alexandria, the Arabs learned there were Jews on the boat. They wanted to board and kill us all. We had to stay locked up inside our cabins for fear of being slaughtered by the Egyptians. The captain told all the passengers that as long as we stayed locked up, he would protect us. But if we dared to venture out-even to the deck-he could not be responsible for our safety.

  We continued sailing around the Levant. We went to Beirut, back to Egypt, and finally to Haifa, which allowed us to enter.

  We had expected to find the “land of milk and honey, “-but there was no milk and no honey, only more war.

  We were placed in an orphanage for girls in Tel Aviv, where they found us jobs in a factory. The fighting made us very nervous. There were no shelters. These were hard times.

  We were happy to be in Palestine, of course. But together with the happiness was a deep sense of sadness, of mourning for everyone who wasn’t here with us.

  We were alone, the two of us, in a strange country. We felt very broken down. We longed for a family.

  Before Mengele left Sterzing for Genoa, his old Gunzburg chum Hans Sedlmeier canLe to see him with news from the family. Karl Mengele, who had finally been released from the internment camp, sent money to help his prodigal son get through the difficult weeks and months ahead.

  Mengele Sr. still doted on his oldest boy. He didn’t want his son to lack for anything while on the run. And throughout the years to come, it would be Josefs father-using Sedlmeier as a preferred intermediary-who saw to it that the war criminal was well cared-for in his exile.

  A benevolent, even humanitarian, streak was surfacing in Karl Mengele.

  Perhaps it had always been there. For not only did he take care of Josef, he also became Gunzburg’s favorite and most generous philanthropist. After the death of his parsimonious wife, Karl Sr.

  sponsored many charity fund-raisers. He got into the habit of placing large sausages in the windows of the ‘homes of Gunzburg’s impoverished residents. And long after World War II, when the Mengele name had come to symbolize evil the world over, the death-camp doctor’s father was the mo
st venerated and venerable man in his town.

  That he was Gunzburg’s largest employer certainly did not hurt his high standing. But Karl Mengele clearly possessed a munificent spirit. It harkened back to the early years when he had sought to give his sons cars and fine clothes over his wife’s objections and contrary to her penurious inclinations. In the past, he had had to keep his generosity in check to avoid enraging Walburga. But now, she was no longer around to raise a fuss. More important, the elder Mengele shrewdly recognized how useful it was to appear civic-minded, if only to counter the barrage of negative publicity about Josef that persisted through the years.

  Although Sedlmeier had been Jose s childhood friend and schoolmate, it was out of respect for the elder Mengele that he devoted so much of his energy to aiding his war-criminal son. Years after Karl Sr. died, Sedlmeier continued to keep a watchful eye on Josef, visiting him regularly in his South American hideouts and making sure he had money to live on.

  For their Italian reunion at the inn, Sedlmeier brought, in addition to cash and family greetings, another wonderful surprise: a package containing scientific slides Mengele had gathered at Auschwitz and sent home for safekeeping. Mengele was delighted. They would be useful in the laboratory work he hoped to resume in Argentina.

  Carrying the money and his precious box of slides, Mengele proceeded to Genoa, where he was met by yet another guide-“Kurt” in the novel.

  Plump but agile, Kurt was a nervous creature who quickly tired of the hero’s haughty airs and prima donna attitude. At one point, Andreas complains that he has not yet explored the lovely Mediterranean city, or even seen the

  “Mare Nostrum,” as he pretentiously

  “You are not exactly a harmless tourist,” he snaps at his emdite charge.

  EVA MOZES: Before we left Romania, Miriam and I wanted to go back to our native village and visit the cemetery where our grandparents were buried. But the villagers were very hostile. They were attacking former landowners-and our family had been one of the wealthiest in the town. I could not even go back to my village to see it one last time.