DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (3 page)

“Beppo.

I remember picking flowers at Auschwitz. One day a warden took me and a group of twin girls to a nearby field. We picked all sorts of wild flowers. Then we walked around the camp holding bunches of flowers for everyone to see.

And as we were walked through the camp, women prisoners started shouting out names-this name, that name.

They were mothers, you see, and they were looking for their daughters as we passed by.

I heard them cry out,

“Maybe my child is among them.”

-EVA KUPAS, twin at Auschwitz A couple of years after the war, our rabbi in Cluj decided to hold a memorial service for all the Jews from our town who had died in the Holocaust.

The rabbi said that if anyone in the congregation had bars of soap left over from the concentration camp, we should bring it to the temple. He told us it had to be “buried” because it had been made from human flesh.

It was the first time I had heard that. Before we left the camp, my twin sister and I took whatever we could with us. At a time when goods were scarce, I used the soap all the time.

After the rabbi’s address, I felt terrified. I thought,

“Maybe I used soap made from my family.”

For years, I had continuous nightmares. Every night, I dreamt I was washing myself with soap made from my parents or my sister.

-EVA MoZES, twin at Auschwitz Prologue.

THE JAZZ BAR.

ZYL THE SAILOR: All my life, I have tried to run away from Auschwitz.

I have sailed everywhere, from the North Sea to the Tropic of Cancer, the Great Lakes of Michigan to Madagascar.

Montevideo, Johannesburg, Hollywood.

But wherever I went, thoughts of the death camp came back to haunt me.

I try to forget. I try to erase the memories. But I can’t seem to leave Auschwitz behind, no matter how far I go. I find reminders of the camp all over the world. Even right here in Israel.

From the window of my apartment house in Ashdod, I can see a factory-a large industrial plant that manufactures I don’t know what.

Textiles, I think. It has a large chimney which spews out fire at night.

And when I look out my window in the evening, I see not a factory chimney, but the crematorium of Birkenau with its flames, its tall red flames leaping out at the sky.

Last night was Lag b’Omer, the feast of the mystics. The festival of bonfires. Once a year, we Jews are supposed to celebrate the end of the mourning period for our lost sages.

All over Israel yesterday, the little children were celebrating by building bonfires. As I walked along the streets, I watched them joyfully throwing bits and pieces of wood into the flames. They roasted potatoes, sang songs, danced around the fire.

Lag B’Omer is only once a year, but I am always seeing fire. Day and night. All year long.

As I watched the children making their bonfires yesterday, I thought of the fire made OF the children. The fire without wood. The fire of AuschwitzBirkenau.

For four months, forty years ago, I also saw fire day and night. I lived in barracks with a group of twins. Twins! Twins! Dr. Mengele only wanted twins.

Our barracks were located just a few yards away from the crematorium.

We could see it from our window, from our door, wherever we turned we saw fire. Every day and every night those four months, we watched as Mengele motioned people toward this crematorium.

We saw thousands of people going in each day. And not one ever came out.

We were so close to this crematorium that we became friends with the Sonderkommandos, the young boys who worked inside the gas chambers. A few of them were from my hometown in Galicia.

They gave us detailed reports: “Today, we burned ten thousand Jews.

Yesterday, we disposed of eight thousand.”

And every day, they warned us,

“You will be next. Dr. Mengele has decided you should be reunited with your parents.” We believed them.

We were sure that tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow, Mengele would send all the twins into the flames.

But even as we expected to die, we continued to obey Mengele. He made us write cheerful postcards: Everything is fine, we wrote to other Jews. We are working.

I see fire everywhere. Although I am at sea, I am consumed by the flames.

Yes, yes, there have been moments when I forgot.

I sailed to the United States a few years ago. My boat docked in New York City. I had a few hours off First, I visited an aunt in Brooklyn.

But I felt restless and uncomfortable. She kept talking and talking, and my mind was elsewhere.

In Auschwitz, I suppose. I finally told her my ship was sailing, and left her house.

I started walking around Manhattan. I was wandering on the West Side, along Eighth or Ninth Avenue, when I saw a large crowd of people standing outside a bar. They were pushing their way in, and I found myself being pushed inside along with them.

Inside, it was dark and cool. I could see musicians lined up on a stage. There were forty, fifty, of them and they were standing in a single straight line. And even though they had no leader, no conductor, they managed to play in perfect harmony.

They were playing music that was not from this earth.

Among the musicians, I noticed

“Satchmo”-Louis Armstrong. I recognized him instantly from photographs.

I ordered a beer. And another. Then another, and another. It was very expensive; you had to leave a tip after each order.

At a table not far from me, there were these two young girls. They sat there, laughing and drinking.

Then, they got up and went over to another table where a couple of young men were sitting, and started kissing them. They embraced to the rhythm of the jazz.

I was in that bar for an hour, the only white man there. I spent sixty dollars-more money than I’ve ever spent in one hour.

Before I even realized what was happening, the same crowd that had pushed itself in, that had pushed me in, got up and left. I was pulled outside with them.

I found myself back on the street. I started walking, and somehow, even though I was quite tipsy, I made it back to my ship.

I have been to New York many, many times since then, and always I have searched for that jazz bar. But I have never been able to find even a trace of it.

I can still remember the music, the atmosphere, the beer, the girls kissing the boys to the beat of Louis Armstrong.

Yes, I was happy then! In fact, never in my life have I been as happy as during the hour I spent inside that dive on the West Side.

Because for one whole hour, I actually managed to forget Auschwitz, and Dr. Josef Mengele…

one.

MENGELE AND HIS CHILDREN.

Nine-year-old Beppo Mengele stood at the Gunzburg railroad station, awaiting the train that would bring in supplies for his father’s factory.

How excited he became when it pulled into the station! The townspeople recall how, in a loud voice, he would order his two brothers to get ready to unload. Young Mengele was always happy when the transports arrived.

Karl and Walburga Mengele often assigned their oldest boy the task of overseeing the shipment of goods to and from the Mengele farm-equipment factory. Beppo would ride the horse-drawn wagon down to the train station, delighting at the ruckus it caused as it clattered across the cobbled stone streets of the sleepy little town. If it was early in the morning, the residents of Augsburgstrasse, Gunzburg’s main street, were awakened by the noise of the heavy steel parts banging and clanging against one another. They would sigh and mutter affectionately,

“Mengele is coming.” With his dark hair, gleaming eyes, and mischievous grin, Beppo was an endearing child-the most popular of the three Mengele brothers.

At the station, the little boy proved that he deserved the trust his parents placed in him. He watched carefully as the shipments were stacked onto the trains. If a train had brought in supplies, he supervised their loading intO the carriage, making certain nothing was broken or left behind.

It was a grownup job, and young Mengele was said to revel in it.

A quarter of a century later, an older Beppo-SS Dr. Josef Mengele -still delighted at the arrival of trains and their cargoes, but at a different railway stop.

Mo SHE OFFER: I was born in 1932 in a small town in what is now a part of Russia.

My twin brother and I were the youngest of four brothers. We were nicknamed

“Miki and Tibi.”

My family was very wealthy. Father owned a large estate with two plants that manufactured liquor. We grew potatoes and fruit on our farm, and made sweet liqueurs from them.

It was a wonderful life. Each morning, Tibi and I were taken to school by a horse-drawn carriage. We owned two horses!

Then the Germans came in 1944. They took everything from us.

They confiscated our gold, our jewelry, our furniture-all our possessions. We were no longer permitted to live on the farm.

Instead, we were ordered to take two suitcases and report to the village synagogue, where we were jammed along with all the other Jews in our town.

From there, we were moved to a ghetto in a big city. The conditions were terrible. We had no clothes. We were forced to wear-literally the shirt on our back. We weren’t given food, either, and we were constantly hungry. Dead people littered the streets; they had starved to death.

One day, the Germans returned. We were taken out of the ghetto and placed in cattle cars. The journey took eight days-eight days without water, without food. It is painful for me to remember what went on there. It is too horrible to describe.

We arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944. I can even tell you the exact time: ten o’clock in the morning.

When they opened the doors to our cattle cars, there were a lot of dead children. During the trip, some mothers couldn’t bear to hear the cries of their hungry babies-and so they killed them. I remember two blond, very beautiful children in my car whose mother had choked them to death because she could not stand to watch them suffer.

When we stepped off the trains, we could hear soldiers yelling,

“Men on one side, women on the other side.” Some German SS guards were also shouting,

“We want twins-bring us the twins!”

Dr. Mengele was making the selections. He stood there, tall, nice looking, and he was dressed very well, as if he wanted to make a good impression.

He had very soft hands, and he made fast decisions.

I heard my father cry out to them he had twins. He went over personally to Dr. Mengele, and told him,

“I have a pair of twin boys.”

Mengele sent some SS guards over to us. My twin, Tibi, and I were ordered to leave our parents and brothers and follow them.

But we didn’t want to be separated from our mother, and so the Nazis separated us by force. My father begged Mengele to give us some food and water. But Mengele motioned to an SS guard, who beat him up on the spot.

As we were led away, I saw my father fall to the ground.

There is nothing in Josef Mengele’s early life that would have prepared him for the notoriety that was destined to engulf him. As a youth, he was charming and carefree and not especially studious. No one who remembers Mengele growing up in his picturesque Bavarian town ever saw a hint of the pathology that would make him a killer, or a sign of the obsessions that would make him a concentration-camp doctor. There was an innocence and a sweetness to young Josef that would lead Gunzburg’s citizens to shake their heads in disbelief when they heard, years later, of his savage deeds at Auschwitz. The fiendish death-camp physician had nothing in common with the lovable youngster they all had known. The Nazi professor brutally experimenting on young twins could hardly have been the same playful little scamp they affectionately called “the Beppo,” years after he had grown out of the childish nickname.

Even as he grandly swept through the barracks at Auschwitz years later, he was like a vision, this handsome, genteel German officer in his impeccable SS uniform, shiny boots, and white gloves. He looked less like a Nazi official than a Hollywood version of one-Tyrone Power in the role of SS captain. Dr. Josef Mengele would maintain this beautiful facade throughout his tenure at Auschwitz. None of the bewildered new arrivals would discern the murderer, or even the sadist, in the polite young SS doctor until it was too late. Mengele would decide who lived and who died with a smile and an airy wave of his elegant white-gloved hand. He would charm the women of AuschwitzBirkenau even as he sent them to the gas chambers. The Gypsies would love him as one of their own to the very end. But Mengele would be at his best with the young twins he removed from the selection line for use in his medical experiments. With them, he could be as warm and affectionate as he had been as a little boy growing up in a small Bavarian farming town. Did He see something of his old self in these children, innocent and doomed? For what better symbol, after all, of Mengele’s own dual nature-the angel and the monster, the gentle young doctor and the sadistic killer-than a twin.

Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Ginzburg, a medieval village on the banks of the Danube. Three years earlier, his mother, Walburga, had given birth to a stillborn child. Soon after, she became pregnant again. within sixteen months, Josef had a brother, Karl Thaddeus. In 1914, another son, Alois, was born. Josef adored “Lolo.” He felt much closer to him than to Karl Jr and, as they grew up, always included him in all their games.

In the years before World War I, the Mengeles lived modestly, sharing a house with another family. While Walburga tended to the boys, Karl Mengele spent most of his time expanding his new factory.

Karl was new to Gun:zburg. He had left his own native village after his older brother inherited the family farm, and studied to become an engineer. Settling in Gunzburg, he had married the strong, energetic Walburga, four years his senior.

Walburga’s parents, who were wealthy farmers, loaned their sonin-law the money to start his new business. Karl quickly proved he deserved the investment by patenting a number of handy farming tools, which enhanced his standing in his wife’s hometown. What precisely these tools were has been lost in Gunzburg’s history-but their inventor, though long dead, still enjoys a reputation as a creative, industrious man.