DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN

by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES

  There are two forms of theater-comedy and tragedy. I am a comedy, and my sister is a tragedy. She does not even like to laugh-while I enjoy Mickey Mouse.

  And even though we both live in the same city, we hardly ever see each other.

  When Alois developed cancer in the early 1970s, Mengele tried to mend fences with him. Upon learning of Lolo’s fatal illness, Josef sent him a long letter expressing his deep sadness. He conveyed once again his dismay at the lack of regular contact between them. He complained he had only learned of his brother’s illness “belatedly” and by chance.

  “Perhaps that is also part of my fate,” he wrote mournfully, “but now, I only have the urge to communicate with you, dear brother.”

  Mengele confessed he had suffered greatly because of the “bizzare” conduct of his youngest brother. In a desperate attempt to effect a reconciliation, Mengele resorted to flattery, telling Alois what a wonderful job he had done running the factory. “As a reward for your exemplary lifestyle and great accomplishments, town has bestowed on you the title of honorary citizen,” he wrote in what was one of his last letters to Lolo. “It is a great honor, and I am very happy about the commemoration of your life’s work, which has indeed been exemplary.”

  Mengele noted how their own father had always thought Lolo could run the business better than anyone. He urged his brother to rest, and let his son and nephew take over the duties. “You should train your offspring to work in the business before it is too late,” he warned.

  Sensing the end was near, Josef thanked his brother for the help he had provided him over the years. He stressed how proud he was of Lolo and his excellence “as a speaker for our family, whose importance you have so greatly increased.” The contrast between his brother’s achievements and his own shambles of a life wasn’t lost on Mengele.

  “I am especially happy over the distinction [you’ve earned] since I am part of the shadow,” he sadly noted. The letter showed how much Alois’s impending death had affected him.

  MOSHE OFFER: With the years, I found myself thinking more and more about my brother, Tibi. I pictured Mengele taking him away for the experiments.

  I remembered how sad he was at the end, when he could no longer walk.

  I would ask myself,

  “Why did I stay alive while he died?”

  A twin brother is something very special. I have a very nice family, wonderful children. But I have no one to confide in. I feel that I want to say things I could only tell my twin. Instead, I keep a lot bottled inside of me.

  With the years, I missed Tibi more and more. I kept wishing he were alive so I could show off my children to him. I liked to fantasize about the wedding he would have had; I wanted very much to see him happily married. I thought about the children he would have had.

  Most of all, I wanted to introduce him to Shai, my son who is so much like him.

  I would fantasize about this all the time.

  Mengele’s extreme sense of solitude was alleviated when he made some new friends. Gerhard introduced him to an Austrian couple, Wolfgang and Liselotte Bossert, who were also die-hard Nazis. Wolfgang had been a Hitler Youth leader during the war and had retained an abiding respect for the leader of the Third Reich. A locksmith by trade, he fancied himself a philosopher, and genuinely admired Dr. Mengele.

  Bossert considered it an honor to frequent the home of such an illustrious Nazi. His wife also enjoyed the company of the urbane, charming Auschwitz doctor.

  The Bossert children “adored” Mengele, Liselotte would later tell the armies of reporters who swarmed around, asking for information about Mengele’s years in hiding. Undoubtedly, the Auschwitz doctor was at his best with the Bosserts’ son and daughter, as he had always been with young children. And they, in turn, Liselotte said, were thoroughly captivated by him. To them, he betrayed none of the mania that characterized his relationship with adults. Even as all old man, Mengele was more at ease with children than with grownups. The youngsters affectionately called him “Uuo”-little uncle-in a manner reminiscent of the twins and the Gypsies of Auschwitz. Both Liselotte and her husband considered the Angel of Death a good influence on their family. They had no qualms about their little ones spending time in his company.

  His new friendship with the Bosserts provided Mengele with a badly needed social outlet. He was on intimate terms with the Austrian couple, and spent entire weekends with them in their beach house or exploring the countryside. At night, Mengele and Bossert, with Gerhard occasionally joining them, sat together chatting. They talked about politics, history, and modern-day Germany, which all agreed could not compare with the mighty Reich. Mengele’s friends were dazzled by his wide range of knowledge, his ability to quote Greek and Latin texts, and, of course, the fact that he had once been a great doctor.

  OLGA GROSSMAN: I was in the hospital for months-but I hated the doctors in the white coats so much, I got worse-I rejected treatment. I wanted to die.

  I missed my children, and they wouldn’t let me see them. I wanted to go through the walls and run and find my kids.

  The doctors were a little afraid of me. They didn’t know how to approach me. I would strike at them, sometimes.

  I was placed in another hospital, and there I met Dr. Stern. She was a young woman, herself a survivor of the camps.

  She was very kind to me. I didn’t feel I was just another patient to her. I felt she really cared. When I met her, I was twenty-five years old and I felt like a little girl. I believed she wanted to take care of me.

  She was like a mother to me.

  My own mother was a sick woman. She couldn’t cope with my problems.

  She had four children still at home, and she didn’t have time for me.

  She couldn’t come to visit me in the hospital as often as I wanted.

  Dr. Stern was so sensitive to my feelings. For example, whenever she saw me, she removed her white coat, and stayed in her regular clothes.

  She never let me see her in white because she knew I was afraid of white coats. Dr. Mengele had always worn a white coat when he saw me.

  Under Dr. Stern’s care, I began to change. I started going out on walks. When I had been on many tranquilizers, I had lost a lot of weight. Now, I ate more, and even put on a few pounds. That was seen as a sign of progress.

  I had always been terrified of taking a shower. I would faint when I took a shower. But now, when nurses offered to help me, I refused: “I am going to take a shower by myself” I would tell them.

  I finally made one request to Dr. Stern: to let me go home and see my children. “I promise to come back to the hospital,” I told her. “I won’t run away.” Miraculously, she said yes. She told me she trusted me to go and return at a certain time.

  I left for a day’s visit. And I found that I wanted to come back. I asked Dr. Stern if I would ever be well enough to leave the hospital permanently. “Yes, yes-I promise you that one day, you will go home for good,” she told me.

  That’s when I resolved to get well. I told myself

  “I am going to get out of here. With Dr. Stern’s help, I am going to get better.” At the other hospital, I had wanted to commit suicide. Here, I wanted to come back simply to see Dr. Stern. I felt that she loved me-I felt I belonged to her.

  Little by little, she got me to open up and talk about what had happened at Auschwitz.

  THE SCHOLAR AND THE PREACHER.

  I don’t like to live in the past. I don’t like to be with other survivors.

  They are always dwelling on the past. “Do you remember this? Do you remember that?” Oh, no: I don’t like that at all. I don’t want to reopen old wounds.

  I went back to my hometown of Cluj, once. It was my first visit since the war.

  I spent a few days there with my husband. I walked around. I went to the house where I had grown up with Ruthie. I visited the last apartment we had lived in before we were deported to Auschwitz. It was very sad.

  But looking for the past is always very sad, isn
’t it? Because we look and we find nothing-only memories and shadows…

  The 1972 Munich Olympics brought back fond memories for Mengele, who, as a young man of twenty-five, had attended the 1936 games in Berlin, a shining moment in Nazi history when Hitler had played host to the entire world. In a letter to Sedlmeier, Mengele urged him to send over special reports of certain events, in case they didn’t receive adequate coverage in Brazil. “I am an old athlete,” Mengele proudly reminded his boyhood friend.

  But the games were ruined by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s brutal attack on the Israeli team, an event that seemed to disturb even the old death-camp doctor. “Of course, this is not the proper method either,” he lamented in his diary. Mengele apparently felt that there was a right way and a wrong way to kill the Jews. The random terror of the PLO’s Black September faction possibly offended his scientist’s sensibilities. As a eugenics doctor, Mengele had preferred a more systematic approach to eliminating the “inferior” race of Jews.

  This murderous assault meant that Mengele had nothing to fear from the Israeli Mossad, which now devoted virtually all of its resources to infiltrating and rooting out Arab terrorist cells. Israel had neither the means nor the inclination to penetrate Nazi circles in South America. Besides, it was forging important diplomatic and military relationships with many of the Latin American states-including those harboring Nazis: Countries such as Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay represented a potentially lucrative market for the Israeli weapons industry. These states were also proving to be solid allies at the United Nations, where a hostile clique of Arab sympathizers was threatening Israel’s very existence.

  But the greatest disincentive was the memory of Eichmann’s cabture.

  The Jewish communities of Latin America had been hurt and punished then. Any new operations would be sure to put them at risk.

  In Paraguay, for instance, while General Stroessner was willing to provide protection for a few Jewish families, he made it clear he didn’t appreciate questions about Mengele. Israel was reminded time and again that Paraguay was its staunchest friend at the UN.

  By the 1970s, the only insistent demands for Mengele’s capture were voiced by Nazihunters like Simon Wiesenthal and others, who had made a career of hunting down war criminals, and who had stalked the Auschwitz doctor for decades with determination. From his musty office in Vienna, crammed with files and guarded by a sullen Austrian police officer, Wiesenthal liked to think he was keeping up with the elusive Angel of Death. He would hold frequent news conferences to announce he was getting closer to finding Mengele. The old Nazihunter constantly claimed to have caught glimpses of him on the run.

  A newsletter he published was replete with “updates” on Mengele’s supposed whereabouts. It was only a matter of time before the infamous Nazi would be safely in the hands of authorities, Wiesenthal would confidently proclaim.

  But while these reports helped keep the memory of the Auschwitz doctor alive, Wiesenthal could only have been a minor annoyance for Mengele and his family. He was usually so mistaken in his supposed sightings that he inadvertently helped out Mengele’s efforts to remain in hiding.

  More than anyone, Wiesenthal helped foster the image of Mengele as a glamorous international fugitive, on the run between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, with occasional jaunts to Europe, and harming anyone who came too close to him. Wiesenthal promoted and embellished the tale of “Nora Eldoc,” an Israeli female spy who supposedly befriended Mengele in a South American resort, and ended up being thrown off a cliff, the victim of a mysterious “accident.”

  Probably the single most repeated story involving Mengele, it was enough to strike fear in the hearts of legions of would-be Mengele hunters.

  There was in fact very little glamour in Mengele’s life, and a great deal of misery. The Olympics aside, 1972 proved to be rather a bad year. As a result of his obsessive worrying, which led him to chew nervously on his mustache, Mengele developed bezoars, hairballs in his stomach. This unusual condition, common to cats-and psychotics-was acutely painful and required surgery. Terrified of being discovered, Mengele approached a surgeon at a local Sao Paulo hospital using his alias, Peter Hochbichler. When the doctor ordered extensive X rays, Mengele insisted on having access to all of them.

  To the doctor’s surprise, Mengele warned him not to make any extra copies of the films. The surgery was succesful, and Mengele made certain to retrieve all copies of his medical records.

  According to Gitta Stammer, even after his convalescence, Mengele seldom left the house. The bulk of his time was spent reading and working on his memoirs, which by then had evolved into an autobiographical novel. Occasionally, he socialized with the Bosserts.

  When his brother Lolo finally succumbed to cancer in 1974, Mengele felt more alone than ever. His relatives in Gunzburg were deluged with his lengthy letters.

  With old age, Mengele’s paranoid tendencies were becoming even more pronounced. His frequent letters home were written in a tortuous, virtually illegible script. He employed an elaborate code to disguise the names of people and places-but it was so arcane that he was the only one who understood it. His family, annoyed by the endless cryptic references, asked him to be more direct-and more succinct. They pointedly suggested that postcards would do as well in maintaining the relationship. But Mengele of course refused: He would have been robbed of his chief source of pleasure. His family then pleaded with him to type out the letters. Sedlmeier himself intervened to ask Mengele both to keep the letters brief and to space them out more. And Bossert sent him a note urging him not to use “so much code language in your letters . Make them so they are understandable to idiots, so we can all avoid the constant misunderstandings.”

  A special, top-secret arrangement had been worked out to get letters to and from Mengele. As with all sensitive matters involving Josef, Sedlmeier was the trusted intermediary, overseeing the scheme that allowed the war criminal to stay in touch with his family. Mengele would send his letters to a post-office box in Switzerland, and Sedlmeier made regular trips to pick them up, making sure they reached the parties to whom they were addressed. Any mail to Mengele also went through Sedlmeier, who sent it to a post office box in Brazil. This complicated arrangement kept up the connection Mengele so desperately wanted with his family. Alas, his nieces and nephews didn’t feel any strong obligation to respond to the voluminous correspondence.

  Family members adopted Lolo’s technique of simply not answering.

  The infrequent mail from home was a source of anguish for Mengele.

  There were times when his Gunzburg relatives didn’t even bother to retrieve the letters he sent them. “I always feel hurt when I become aware that no one is picking up my mail,” he complained to someone code-named

  “Kitt.”

  “Your neglect is a source of great pain to me.

  Despite the family’s cold shoulder, Mengele retained a passionate concern with trivia and idle Gunzburg gossip. Like a spinster aunt with no life of her own, Mengele kept close track of the romances and little domestic squabbles, the weddings, pregnancies, and births in his boyhood town. “I heard a rumor that Dieter [Lolo’s son] is going to be married,” he writes to Sedlmeier. “Who is the lucky girl?” In the same letter, he sends warm wishes to a boyhood chum whose son has just become a doctor. “If I had to choose again, I would choose the same profession,” the Auschwitz doctor blithely observes.

  “Congratulations.”

  MOSHE OFFER: Happy occasions are the worst times of the year for me.

  Instead of feeling cheerful. I feel lost, remembering all the people who aren’t here with me.

  I become so depressed, I find myself thinking I would have been better off if I had died along with my brother at Auschwitz.

  When I held my son’s bar mitzvah, it was like a day of mourning for me.

  It was like a funeral.

  I kept thinking about my dead brother, about all my family. “Why aren’t they he
re with me?” I kept thinking. “Why am I all alone?”

  PETER SOMOGYL: When my son was bar mitzvahed, it was supposed to be a very happy event for me-after all, he was my first-born son. But I could not stop crying.

  We were all crying.

  JUDITH YGUDAH: Holidays and special occasions are the hardest. Here in Israel, everyone has a big family they can celebrate with. But we have no extended family.

  My husband has no surviving sisters or brothers. And I don’t have Ruthie.

  My children would often ask,

  “Why don’t we have cousins?”

  HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: During joyful occasions, we feel sad. If there’s a bar mitzvah, or a wedding for our sons or daughters, we think of our mother instead. We remember her saying good-bye to us, and we get depressed.

  But by 1975, Mengele had enough problems on his own home turf to worry too much over events in distant Gunzburg: His loyal friend and protector Gerhard decided to leave Brazil, and Gitta Stammer resolved to kick Mengele off the farm. In Gerhard’s case, both his wife, Ruth, and their son were dying of cancer. He hoped that by moving them back to Austria, there might be a better chance at a cure than in Brazil.

  Before he left, Gerhard gave his friend an invaluable gift: his identity papers. Sixty-four-year-old Josef Mengele, alias Peter Hochbichler, became fifty-year-old Wolfgang Gerhard.

  But Mengele’s other guardians, the Stammers, proved less charitable at the end. “You are not in any position to push me around,” Gitta once told Mengele, alluding to his status as a wanted man.

  Although she didn’t follow through on her veiled threats to expose him, she made it clear he would need a new home. She was going to sell the farm, buy herself a house, and devise a separate living arrangement for the death-camp doctor. Her days as a caretaker were over.

  That same year, Mengele left the Stammers’ residence and moved into his own house. Home for the Gunzburg heir was a small, shack like structure in one of Sao Paulo’s more decaying neighborhoods. As a final favor, the Stammers had chosen the residence themselves, had purchased it, and rented it to Mengele. And with the profit they made from selling their own farm-originally purchased with money provided by the Mengele family-Gitta and Geza bought a splendid villa in an affluent section of Sao Paulo. It was a small enough reward for the years they had harbored the erratic Dr. Mengele.