DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (32 page)

He urged Rolf to investigate a girl’s family for its “rank and reputation.”

After that, her wealth naturally had to be taken into account.

But Mengele didn’t limit himself to prying into his son’s romances.

He also injected his views on Rolf’s work and career prospects, often expressing disapproval. His letters suggest he thought his son was shallow and superficial. “You and your generation have not been educated to survive,” he wrote at one point. Mengele faulted Rolf for being too materialistic-for desiring money, cars, and other comforts.

But not all of Mengele’s letters to Rolf were angry. In between the admonitions and advice, the incessant demands and harsh rebukes, he displayed a deep love for his son. In one letter, he reminisced about a day he was home taking care of Rolf, then just an infant.

“There was an air raid, and I took you in my arms and ran to the bomb shelter,” Mengele recalled. “The worrying and responsibility I felt for you as a child are still with me, as if it were yesterday,” he wrote.

HEDvAH AND LEAH STERN: When we became mothers, we were so overprotective, we never let our children out of our sight. Our lives were completely devoted to them.

For example, when they came home from school, they would sit down at the table and have their meals served on the spot-on the spot.

Occasionally, friends invited us to go out to dinner or to see a movie.

But we would never go out with our husbands and leave the children with a baby-sitter. Either we went out or our husbands did but we never left the house together.

HEDvAH STERN: One day, my son told me,

“Look, Mom, you can go out with Daddy and leave me by myself-I’m a big boy now. I’ll watch over the other children.” He was ten years old at the time. But I simply couldn’t deal with the thought of going out with my husband and leaving the children alone. I couldn’t cope with that. I left the house-but I felt frightened the whole evening.

OLGA GROSSMAN: When my children were young, I would not let them leave my side. I needed to have them near me constantly. I was obsessed with them.

Having them close by was like being able to breathe. After I saw them off to school in the morning, I collapsed.

There were days I wouldn’t even let them go to school. I made them stay home with me, instead. They’d get embarrassed. “Mommy, we have run out of excuses,” they would tell me. “What are we going to tell our teachers?”

But I didn’t care.

Perhaps I was feeling guilty for all the time I had left them alone when they were small, and I had to be hospitalized. My conscience was killing me.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I have two children-a boy and a girl. I worry about them constantly.

I always feel afraid for them. I am a burden on them, I am sure.

PETER SOMOGYL: I worried constantly about my children. When they went away, I insisted they call home every day. I needed to have copies of their class schedules, their school schedules-I always had to know exactly where they were.

If they didn’t call for a couple of days I would tell my wife,

“What’s the matter with the children-let’s call them.”

I was always terrified I would be separated from them.

Mengele took out his frustration about his own failed career on Rolf, who was struggling to lead the appearance of a normal life. When Rolf informed his father he was not going to finish his Ph. D. in law, Mengele became livid. It wasn’t enough that his son was already a professional, a trained lawyer assured of a good future. The man who had earned two advanced degrees, then endured the humiliation of seeing them taken away, seemed determined that his son should gain back the professional standing he himself had lost. A major argument erupted between father and son. In vain, Rolf tried to list the reasons he had abandoned his dissertation. He lacked the money to finish. He was no longer interested in the subject matter. He was tired.

Mengele promptly sent a scathing letter to his son. “I accept that you lack interest and are not willing to work-but I do not accept that you don’t have enough money,” Mengele wrote, apparently forgetting that Rolf had no claim to the family fortune. After the war, Mengele had signed papers relinquishing any share in the estate. Mengele went on to point out how foolish it was for Rolf to drop out at such a late stage, “especially as you have studied so many semesters, and have three years of training.” Deeply upset, he remarked, “I do not have the proper words to express my feelings. I was very hurt. The doctorate was the only desire I ever had for you.

In his longing for his son to recoup the respect he had lost, Mengele failed to realize that Rolf had inherited neither his intellect nor his fierce drive and ambition. In spite of the guilt his father made him feel, Rolf abandoned his doctoral thesis, and decided to practice law instead. He eventually opened a small law practice in Freiburg.

It was a modest path for a man of modest ambitions. Dr. Mengele’s son was to exhibit several of his father’s traits as he grew older, from his charm to his obsessive-compulsive qualities, but the burning ambition, the deep need to achieve, was never among them. Rolf settled instead for a quiet existence near his mother, shunning both Gunzburg and the Mengele clan. Irene herself had little or no dealings with the Mengeles. Whether she actively encouraged a relationship between Rolf and his father, or chose simply not to stand in the way, is unclear.

The relationship between father and son took a decided turn for the better in 1976, when Rolf became engaged to a blonde of good Aryan stock. It would be his second marriage; his first, to a pretty brunette who had been his childhood sweetheart, had lasted less than a year. Dr. Mengele was delighted with his son’s new choice of mate.

Almuth Jenkel was a stunning beauty, with long flaxen hair and big blue eyes-a modern version of the Hitlerian ideal. The large breasts and athletic look of the 1930s poster girls were out. Fashion now dictated a delicate, more slender type of Aryan womanhood, which Almuth embodied.

Best of all, she was a twin. “Mengele was both fascinated and delighted with the fact that his own son had married a twin,” Rolf would later recall. Mengele grilled him about her genetic background.

Evidently satisfied, he extolled the benefits of the union from another genetic point of view. “For the first time, one of our own has gotten his wife from north of the Main line,” he exulted in a letter to Rolf.

While his family came from southern Germany, Mengele, like other racial hygienists, believed the best genetic traits were to be found in the northern regions. “This movement north of the border is to be welcomed, and one can only expect the best from this new match.”

Indeed, he told his son he hoped his daughter-in-law would bear twin grandchildren. “Even the characteristic of Almuth as a nonidentical twin was of special interest to me,” Mengele noted in his journals.

And it is possible that Rolf was also trying to please this father he hardly knew but who had haunted his childhood and youth. If nothing else, it was considerably easier to wed the lovely Almuth than to finish a tedious dissertation.

OLGA GROSSMAN: My daughter fell in love with a Canadian boy and decided to marry him and move to Canada. She settled in Calgary, near the North Pole.

I knew even then that she was running away from me-from my past. She had been forced to live with it since she was a baby. It was very difficult for her, and so I guess she did what she could to survive: She moved as far away from me as possible.

But once she got there, she realized the bond we had as a family was much too precious. She wanted to have children-but she couldn’t bear the thought of her parents not knowing their own grandchildren.

And so, her marriage suffered.

At about the time of Rolf’s engagement, Mengele expressed a longing to see his son-a request he had made repeatedly over the years.

The two had not met since the 1956 holiday in Switzerland, when Rolf hadn’t known the handsome Uncle Fritz was really his father. Mengele’s son hesitated; the relationship had been so troubled over recent years, as far as he was concerned, it might best be left to letters and photographs. Ultimately, pity and curiosity prompted Rolf to change his mind-pity for the father who was old and sick, and curiosity to better know the man who had been widely depicted as a monster.

Preparations for the trip to Brazil were hampered by the ambivalence both father and son felt about the trip. Josef kept dictating elaborate security precautions. Rolf kept postponing the date of the voyage.

Once again, as with all family crises involving Mengele, Hans Sedlmeier stepped in. The perfect diplomat, Sedlmeier encouraged Rolf to follow through on his resolve by reminding him that his father was still badly shaken by a recent stroke: His last desire was to see his son.

Sedlmeier told Mengele, meanwhile, that his son was of a different generation, and that he should not expect too much of him.

PETER SOMOGYL: One day, I was leafing through Life magazine, and I nearly jumped: There was Twins’ Father-both his picture and an article about him.

There was also an old photograph of my brother and [me], taken when we got back to Hungary after the war. We had mailed it to Twins’ Father to let him know we had arrived safely.

My wife and I were living in America at this time. We had left Canada for the U.S. during the turbulent period of the Quebec Separatist movement. Many Canadian Jews had panicked and fled Montreal-including my wife’s family. They felt very strongly that we should move, too.

As I read the article, I got more and more nervous. I was gasping for air.

The next morning, I called up the magazine. I asked them for Twin’s Father’s address: They didn’t know it. I called up the Israeli embassy in Washington. “Can you give me his address?” I begged them.

They informed me there were five Zyl Spiegels in Tel Aviv. “Give me all five,” I said.

I wrote to all five of them. And sure enough, he sent me back a letter. He told me his daughter was living in Brookline, Massachusetts, and that he was planning to visit her. That’s how we arranged to meet.

OLGA GROSSMAN: When my daughter separated from her husband, I decided I had to see her through the divorce. I decided to go to Canada and live with her for a while, and help her overcome her depression.

When I left for Canada, I was terrified. It was extremely difficult to leave my husband, my son, and Dr. Stern. But I said to myself

“My child needs me: Now is the time I can offer her my help.”

I left my family for three months and went to stay with my daughter.

At last, a date for the trip was set, airline tickets were purchased.

So as not to endanger his father, Rolf would travel with a false passport.

In May 1977, Rolf flew from Germany to Rio de Janeiro and traveled from there to Sao Paulo. Although he was employing an alias-the passport he used was actually a friend’s-he was constantly afraid he was being followed, and would unknowingly lead authorities to his father.

OLGA GROSSMAN: I arrived in Canada at the worst time of the year.

There was so much snow. It was beautiful-but it reminded me of Auschwitz. I settled in my daughter’s apartment. When she left for work each morning, I would go do the shopping.

One day, I was caught in a terrible snowstorm. I was very frightened.

That’s when I told myself

“I am going to bring my daughter back home-where she belongs.”

And that’s exactly what I did. I brought her back to Israel.

PETER SOMOGYL: The day Twins’ Father arrived, he called me on the telephone to arrange a date when we could meet. I was working, and it was hard for me to get away. We thought I should come up to Boston on the weekend but I was extremely nervous. “I’ll leave work now, and I’ll come up and meet you,” I told him.

I told my boss I had to leave, ran out of the office, got in my car, and started driving to Massachusetts.

When I arrived at his daughter’s house in Brookline, I found a lot of reporters waiting for me outside. The neighbors had thought this would be an interesting reunion, and they had called the press. But I walked straight past the cameras into the house.

We didn’t say a word to each other-not a single word. We simply hugged.

He had changed: It had been so many years. His wife was crying in one corner-his daughter was crying in another corner.

According to Rolf, the reunion was tender and sentimental. Mengele’s “child” was thirty-three; Josef was sixty-six, ailing, and seemed much older. During Rolf’s stay, the old Nazi was often on the verge of tears, so glad was he to be reunited with his son again. In interviews given years later, Mengele’s son depicted his father as warm and loving.

“You surely do not believe what has been said about me?” Rolf said his father asked when questioned about Auschwitz. It was then that Dr. Mengele swore “by my mother’s eye” he had never “personally” killed anyone.

The rest of the trip was warm and familial. Their two weeks together were crammed with sightseeing trips, family gossip, and even some political discussions. At one point, Mengele and his son argued about the death penalty. Josef was in favor of it; his son was firmly opposed to it.

Dr. Mengele seemed anxious to be at his best. He proudly took his son around to meet his friends the Bosserts. They also ran into the Stammers during one of their outings. Although they were estranged from Mengele, the Hungarian couple was all smiles when they posed with Rolf for pictures. Mengele even played tour guide and showed Rolf the country he had reviled for nearly twenty years. In an effort to woo Rolf, he offered him the use of the lone bed in the house, while he slept on the floor. And perhaps it was to woo the public that Mengele’s son recounted this incident over and over again, as if to show there was another, more human side to his father.

On the last day, the two took a trip to Bertioga Beach, where the Bosserts had their cottage. The weather was idyllic, and father and son relished their final hours together. Both sensed it would be the last time they would see each other. The next morning, Mengele insisted on escorting Rolf to the airport in Sao Paulo, in spite of the risks. But so as not to attract attention, the farewells were brief and somewhat impersonal.