DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  In Genoa, the first order of business was to get Mengele a fake passport from the Swiss consulate. The fact that he already had an International Red Cross ID made this very easy. The ID card was viewed as a legitimate document by the Swiss government, which used It as a basis for giving war refugees legal passports. Using this route, many Nazi war criminals were able to exploit the humanitarian instincts of the International Red Cross and Switzerland to obtain the necessary documents to flee Europe. Of course, neither entity knowingly helped Nazis evade justice.

  At the Swiss consulate, Mengele was certain the attractive wide-eyed clerk was staring at him: Did she recognize him? Although the woman’s demeanor was professional and she seemed eager to help, Mengele feared she had guessed his true identity. Occasionally, she would look up from her papers and smile at him. It was an innocent gesture, and quite possibly due to the fatal attraction Mengele always held for women. But it was enough to make the former death-camp doctor lose the poise and proud manner that had so irritated his Italian guide.

  Mengele now sought to get the formalities over with as quickly as possible.

  His worst suspicions seemed confirmed the next day, when Mengele discovered the passport she had issued him was useless. Purposely or unwittingly, the smiling clerk had stamped the date he applied for the papers on the line marked “expiration date.” This meant the passport had expired the previous day. Mengele was sure it was a trick.

  But he went back to the consulate and was relieved when another clerk willingly issued him a valid passport without any questions.

  The memory of the consulate clerk haunted Mengele for years thereafter.

  He kept seeing her vague smile, her eyes that seemed to see right through him. Over a quarter of a century later, he was able to vividly conjure her for his novel.

  Next came the mandatory physical examination at the harbor. A Croatian doctor performed the examinations and administered the required vaccines. For a few extra lire, the doctor obligingly backdated the certificate of innoculation by two weeks, to enable Mengele to obtain an exit visa. Mengele had to undergo another physical exam at the port. There, he noted the disgusting habits of his professional colleague. The Croatian doctor used the same instruments again and again, paying no heed to the dangers of transmitting infection.

  The veteran of Nazi death-camp infirmaries, where knives were used instead of scalpels and patients were left to shiver and die on bare planks of wood, was appalled at the lack of sanitation at the port of Genoa.

  The last item Mengele needed to escape was an exit visa. Mengele’s Genoan contact had planned to bring his application to the attention of an Italian official known for his kindness toward refugees-especially those who exchanged money for his favors. But by a twist of fate, the man was away on holiday. Mengele’s ship, however, was set to sail in just three days. In the novel, the vessel is called the North Queen, startlingly close to the actual name of the ship Mengele boarded: the North King.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: It was the great exodus out of Europe.

  Mother and I finally got our visas. We took a train to Constanza, a port on the Black Sea, and then we boarded a ship.

  Thousands and thousands of Jews were using the same route.

  EVA MOZES: It took nearly two years, but at last, all of us-my twin sister, my aunt, my uncle, and I-finally received our visas. We quickly made arrangements to sail to Palestine from Constanza.

  We started packing furiously. Tables, beds, clothes! We were going to wrap everything we owned and take it with us.

  But then we were told we could take only fifty kilos of belongings.

  Everything else was to be signed over to the Romanian government.

  And then, when we got to the ship, we learned we would only be able to board with the clothes on our backs. Our ship was built to hold a thousand people-instead, three thousand were to be crammed in.

  I wore three dresses, one on top of the other. Miriam, too.

  We had come back from the camps with nothing, four years before, and now we were leaving with nothing.

  In the novel, Andreas awkwardly tries to slip the official in charge of granting exit visas twenty thousand lire. But the functionary will not be bribed, and starts questioning Andreas closely. When Andreas tells him he is from a small town in the South Tyrol, he is openly skeptical. With a flick of the wrist, the official dispatches Andreas to jail.

  In real life, Josef Mengele did spend several weeks inside a Genoa prison-the only punishment he ever received for his murderous deeds.

  The man who once condemned thousands to a fate far worse than an Italian prison cell felt he would go mad. He paced up and down, raging like a wild animal, according to his novel. Gone was the controlled camp doctor who calmly went about his duties sending people to die with a smile. At no point did it occur to him that his imprisonment might be a punishment for his Auschwitz crimes. Indignation, not remorse, was Dr. Mengele’s only emotion.

  In an ironic turn of events, several of Mengele’s prison peers were drug addicts and cripples and a host of other “inferior beings” whom he would have swiftly dispatched to die in the crematoriums-or to be tortured in his laboratory-in former years. There was a dwarflike, handicapped street musician and a doctor who was a morphine addict.

  When the doctor began showing withdrawal symptoms, shaking and crying until he cut himself breaking a window. Mengele watched and didn’t even try to help. The addict was simply another defective human being responsible for his plight, not worthy of care or compassion.

  The weeks Mengele remained in jail seemed an eternity. But at last, the friendly Italian bureaucrat his contact had tried to reach earlier returned from his holiday. Apprised of the situation, he quickly set Mengele free-and even apologized to the war criminal. Mengele was able to board the ship whose sailing had somehow been miraculously delayed.

  Thanks to the corrupt official, his ticket was even upgraded from tourist to second class: This was just a small way the Italian government showed how sorry it was for Mengele’s unfortunate detention.

  Mengele’s escape from Europe belies all the exotic theories that existed for years on how the Angel of Death had eluded capture. There was no sophisticated Nazi network in operation to ferret him out to safety. He was not aided by the American government or any of its intelligence agencies. The Vatican had no apparent role in his flight.

  Like so many other war criminals, Mengele simply paid a series of accomplices with no particular affiliation and took advantage of the International Red Cross.

  In chaotic postwar Europe, with thousands of refugees and displaced persons in need of false papers, there were many men like Nino and Kurt around willing to help-for a fee. Even the high-level Italian official who released Mengele from jail was probably not linked to any nefarious underground Nazi brotherhood. Rather, he was simply used to getting paid generously for his services. Ultimately, petty corruption inside the Italian bureaucracy was what saved Dr. Mengele, even after he’d finally been caught and placed behind bars.

  By the time Mengele set sail for Argentina, he was no longer quite as confident as when he’d first made the decision to leave Germany.

  In the course of the long transatlantic voyage, he learned it was not going to be easy to start anew. His German credentials were not enough for him to practice medicine in Argentina: He would need to get recertified, a process that meant going through school again, possibly for many years.

  Yet when the North King sailed into the bustling harbor of Buenos Aires, Mengele felt some of his old optimism and boyish excitement return. It was that feeling of endless possibilities that had graced his youth in Gunzburg, rekindled by the charm of the new land, a sense of hope as heady as the scent of a summer night on the Plaza.

  EVA MOZES: It was early in the morning when our ship approached Haifa.

  We watched the sun rise over Mount Carmel. It was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen.

  Most everyone on the boat was a Holocaust sur
vivor. We all stood up and started singing

  “Hatikvah,” the Jewish national anthem.

  We hugged and kissed each other. We felt at last we had come home.

  seven.

  FUGITIVE’S IDYLL VERA GROSSMAN.

  After leaving our parents, Olga and I were taken to a convalescent home in Ireland. It was located in an old castle, not far from Dublin.

  It was a beautiful castle-really beautiful-just like in the movies. It even had a moat.

  There were fields all around, miles and miles of green fields. I remember picking wild apples from trees, and strawberries from strawberry fields. I had never tasted strawberries before.

  They fed us constantly. After the war, my sister and I were skinny and undernourished. We had problems with our lungs. I became very friendly with the cook. She was a big fat woman, and I remember hugging her, and clinging to her apron.

  I loved being inside the kitchen, loved the way it smelled. All my life I had been hungry, and for once I was getting more than enough to eat.

  Many of the other children there were Holocaust survivors. Some had spent the war in hiding. Olga and I were quite popular. We were nicknamed “the twins.”

  I got a reputation as a real mischief-maker. I led the other children.

  At night, we would put sheets over our heads and wander around the castle, making believe we were ghosts.

  I remember feeling very happy there. It was a carefree, idyllic period.

  In Buenos Aires, Mengele discovered a metropolis that was thoroughly Latin American, yet longed to be European. Although smaller than Sao Paulo and less attractive than Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires was unquestionably the capital of South America, the city that had the most to offer.

  Cafes lined the wide avenues, as in Rome and Paris. Late at night, one could amble through the streets and hear faint strains of jazz or the samba. The cabarets were crowded every night with bejeweled young women and their wealthy escorts.

  Reigning over them was the charismatic Juan Peron, a dictator’s dictator, with a movie-star smile and an iron-clenched fist, ruthless and charming. Peron was the embodiment of machismo-yet he worshiped only one woman, his wife, Eva.

  During the seven years they were married, Evita was seen everywhere, discussing military strategy with the generals, whispering to Juan at state meetings, helping him to make policy decisions, presiding over groundbreaking ceremonies for charitable institutions, and, after a long day, idly smoking a cigarette in a nightclub where she had once been a chorus girl. Peron, shrewd politician that he was, realized that his wife was one of his best assets in retaining control over the fickle Argentinian population. Evita was adored, a mythical creature, enshrined even before her premature death.

  Of course, Evita had her critics, including the American diplomats who thought her a hindrance, and maybe even a threat, to Peron’s power.

  But Peron shrewdly disregarded the Americans’ opinion. He had his gripes with a country that persisted in calling him a closet Nazi even though, as he never tired of reminding them, in the late 1940s he was welcoming more Jewish immigrants than the United States. As for the Nazis he allowed to immigrate to Argentina, he argued that letting them in was yet another demonstration of his humanitarian bent. Juan Peron would not turn anyone away. Thanks to him, Argentina was a haven for all war refugees, Jewish or Nazi, fleeing Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

  Concentration-camp guards and their victims alike were drawn to Argentina for its Western charm and culture and, more significantly, its open-door policy. Nazi war criminals fled their old homes.

  Jewish survivors sought new homes to replace the ones they had lost.

  They knew that Peron would not tolerate any displays of antiSemitism.

  The two did not mix, although Nazis did occasionally frequent Jewish-owned shops. Both groups discovered large communities of their compatriots who had been in Argentina for years. Even before the war, Jews had flocked to Argentina-one of the few countries that allowed them in-and had built a cohesive community.

  Similarly, thousands of Germans had emigrated to Argentina, beginning a century before, in search of better economic opportunities than those available in Europe. They founded German clubs, German schools, German shops, and-most tantalizing for Mengele-a German hospital, which served as a symbol of what his future would hold if he flourished in the New World. And there were also several Nazi organizations that pledged loyalty to the Reich and the Fuhrer even years after the war was over.

  Endemic to the community was a strong nostalgia, a heartfelt longing for their homeland that underscored every activity.

  JUDITH YAGUDAH: Mother regretted leaving Romania. She disliked Israel from the moment we set foot on the ground: she said it reminded her of Auschwitz.

  When we arrived, we were taken to a refugee camp in Atlit. We lived not in houses, but in tents. The country was very poor. Whatever you needed to live-bread, milk, eggs-had to be purchased with coupons.

  Life was very hard.

  In our camp, there were a lot of immigrants from Asia and North Africa.

  The men walked around all day in their pajamas-striped pajamas. At Auschwitz, male inmates had also worn striped uniforms that looked a lot like these pajamas. That’s what reminded Mother of the concentration camp.

  “This is like Auschwitz,” Mother would say.

  MOSHE OFFER: When I arrived in Israel, all the children I had traveled with had someone they could go to-a cousin, an uncle, a friend. I had nobody.

  I was placed in an orphanage. I was the only Holocaust victim there, and it was very hard for me. On the weekends, the children went home to their relatives. I was left all by myself I was very jealous of the other children. When the weekend was over, they returned with care packages and pocket money given to them by their families. They could buy themselves little treats, go to the movies. But I had no money at all.

  I lived from hand to mouth. Sometimes, I would sneak into the cinema.

  If I was caught, the ushers or the owner would beat me up and throw me out.

  These were very hard times, and I was extremely depressed. I felt completely alone.

  Sometimes, they would close the kitchens. Since I always felt hungry, I picked through the garbage for food to eat.

  Restaurants in the German-Argentine community disdained the local cuisine, favoring beer over fruit juice and serving schnitzel rather than the ubiquitous steaks. An old Victrola cranked out nostalgic songs from before the war a famous lied, perhaps, or a patriotic German anthem. Clusters of old men sat around recalling the days when it seemed certain that Germany would rule the world. Discussions invariably returned to the empire they had lost. Such conversations made these defeated soldiers of the Reich much less gloomy. They spent their days in cozy establishments that bore a striking resemblance to the restaurants and beer halls of Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin.

  For the wealthier, more cosmopolitan Germans, Buenos Aires was a favorite city, a place that offered some relief from the arid drudgery of the South American hinterland. Its natives were also more sophisticated, and there was some social mixing of the Germans with the Argentine upper classes. Wealthy Argentines rivaled the Germans in their tastes and snobbish sense of superiority. There was also a deep and pervasive antiSemitism among the Argentine elite that was attractive to Nazi immigrants. But as long as Juan Peron was in power, these antiSemitic sentiments were not allowed to go beyond the priVate drawing rooms of Argentina’s upper crust.

  At first, Mengele’s world was far removed from Argentine-or German-high society. He arrived in Argentina penniless, the money his father had sent him via Sedlmeier having been used up during his Genoa adventures.

  A German contact who was supposed to meet Mengele at the boat’s landing never showed up.

  EVA MorEs: When we stepped off the boat in Haifa, an uncle was waiting for us.

  He hugged us. He said he wished our parents had left Cluj and settled in Palestine before the war, as he had done
. Then they would have been with us, instead of gassed in a German concentration camp.

  But Mother had said no. We were leading a good life in Eastern Europe.

  She had heard conditions in Palestine were too “primitive,” especially for raising young children. She convinced Father to stay put and not make the family emigrate.

  Miriam and I cried in our uncle’s arms about those lost years and our parents tragic mistake.

  He took us to a distribution center for immigrants. A week later, we were moved to a Youth Aliyah village. This was a center for children who were either orphans or whose parents could not take care of them.

  These centers had been started in 1934 to rescue children from the Holocaust. After the war, they were used to help children who had survived the concentration camps.

  LEA LORINCZI: When we arrived in Israel, we were met by my future husband although of course, I did not know then that we would get married.

  He was my stepmother’s brother.

  He was very nice. He arranged it so that we did not have to go to any refugee camp. Instead, he got us a room in Jerusalem. My parents, my twin brother, and I all lived in that one room.

  Mengele was forced to spend his first few weeks in a cramped room in a fourth-class hotel, one built especially to accommodate the thousands of refugees who poured in each month from Europe. The racial hygienist shared a room with two other people. He made do with a community toilet and sink located at the end of the hall.

  Mengele could stroll by the elegant cafe’s and admire the pretty women.

  In actuality, he was more impressed by Argentina’s soldiers than its women. In letters composed many years later, Mengele bemoaned the younger generation of Germans and what he saw as their “cowardly inferiority complexes.” In Argentina, soldiers and generals were revered, and showered with status and privilege. He admired the respect the country gave to “military tradition,” and ruminated sadly on the fall of the German Army. He was especially drawn to Juan Peron’s imposing personal guards, who stood on duty outside the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. Despite his poverty, Mengele felt at home-more so than he had in his own country after the war.