DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (35 page)

We wanted to know what had been done to us. We felt the world should research the injections and surgeries we had undergone.

ZYL THE SAILOR: I walked in thinking,

“I should know half the people in this room.” A pair of twins immediately came up to me, and said hello.

They told me,

“How could we forget you-you and your brother were always fighting.” And one of them remembered not only my name, but my number-and even my twin’s number. I checked my arm, and sure enough, it was the same as he remembered.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: As the years passed, I had tried not to think about Auschwitz at all.

I tried to push it back and live in the present.

On the other hand, whenever a book about the Holocaust came out, I ran to get it.

Auschwitz was in me-like a heavy parcel I had to drag around all the time.

After the reunion, I felt very sad. I had a very hard week. I thought about Ruthie a lot. I talked with my mother about her. I told my children stories about her. I lit a candle for her.

Buoyed by the discovery of nearly a hundred twin survivors, Eva and Miriam decided to form CANDLES, an organization whose sole purpose would be to publicize the plight of Mengele’s child victims.

Parade magazine’s publication in September 1984 of Anderson’s feature story on the Auschwitz twins helped focus the spotlight on CANDLES.

Thousands of readers around the United States sent contributions, and other journalists also were spurred to begin writing about the unusual group. The attention prompted Eva and Miriam to plan the most dramatic project ever undertaken by a group of survivors: a return to the death camp.

In January 1985, CANDLES traveled to Auschwitz to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the camp’s liberation from the Nazis.

Led by the Mores sisters, twins from Israel and America braved once again the frigid Polish winter and their own demons for a walk through Auschwitz. Journalists from around the world descended on it to hear the forty-year-old story of the twins’ ordeal under the abominable Dr. Mengele. With tears and prayers, the twins toured the relics of the camp, anxious now to remember something of their terrible childhood past, the past they’d spent all their adult years trying to forget.

MIRIAM MOZEs: It was very terrible to go back. I felt like I was going to a funeral.

Auschwitz had been the last place I had seen my mother, my father, my older sisters.

EVA MOZES: We walked to the spot where the twins’ barracks had stood.

There was only the foundation left: We learned that the Poles had destroyed it and used it for firewood.

But everything around the twins’ barracks was just as I remembered it.

There was the watch tower! And here were the brick barracks that were used to warehouse the dead-just the same as when I had left it, forty years before.

MENASHE LORINCZI: I decided to go to the crematorium by myself I left the group and walked inside. I started to read the psalms of David.

I never cry-often, I have wanted to cry, but I could not. But there, in the crematorium, I found myself crying. I prayed, and then I cried.

MIRIAM MOZES: When someone dies in the Jewish religion, it is very important to bury them quickly. You are then expected to “sit shivah”-to mourn them.

But the mourning period is strictly limited.

All these years, I never buried my parents. There was never any funeral. I never did anything in their memory, not even to say a memorial prayer.

Instead, for years, I kept on mourning their loss.

Oddly enough, I felt strangely free at Auschwitz. At last, I had found my mother’s resting place. I could speak to my mother there. It was the only place in the world I felt close to her. Our liberation had happened in 1945, but I felt personally liberated for the first time in 1985. I felt I could stop looking for my mother. I knew I had found her resting place.

Finally, the twins retraced the Death March in which thousands of prisoners had trudged through the snow, just days before Soviet troops arrived. And as they marched, Mengele’s children began to sing-loud, boisterous Hebrew songs.

EVA MorES: One of the reporters asked me,

“Why are you singing?” I told him that I felt strangely upbeat. I had never walked through these grounds as a free human being. Forty years before, I had been a skinny kid, halfdead, an orphan. Then, we could have died like flies, and it wouldn’t have mattered. Now here I was, surrounded by the world press.

Since the Holocaust, I had always felt that if only the world knew our story, it would care. At Auschwitz, surrounded by all those reporters, I felt, People do care.

The whole time I was at Auschwitz, I had this wonderful feeling my mother was there also, listening to me, watching over me. If I could, I would go back to Auschwitz every year.

After Auschwitz, the twins returned to Israel and held a mock trial of Dr. Mengele at Yad Vashem, Israel’s monument to the six million Jewish Holocaust victims. Nearly thirty twins and dwarfs testified before a sIx-man tribunal of world dignitaries. General Telford Taylor, whose team of Nuremberg prosecutors had let Mengele slip away, who had dismissed Mengele as dead, was on hand for the trial. And so was Gideon Hausner, who had successfully prosecuted Adolf Eichmann.

Simon Wiesenthal, who had kept the memory of Mengele and so many other war criminals alive when the world would rather have forgotten, occupied a place of honor on the podium.

Shyly, one by one, Mengele’s twins stepped up and, under the glare of the TV lights and cameras, told the world of their ordeal.

Moshe Offer addressed the tribunal from behind a curtain. In a halting voice, he spoke of his brother Tibi’s ordeal under Dr. Mengele, the successive surgeries he had undergone, culminating in his barbaric castration and death. Zyl Spiegel, who had been known only as Twins’ Father, recounted his efforts to care for and protect the boy twins even as he feared Mengele’s wrath. When Spiegel’s presentation was over, all the boys who had been under his ministering rose to greet their Twins’ Father. A former nurse at Auschwitz recalled watching Mengele “sew” two twins together in an effort to make them Siamese. A pair of female dwarfs-also twin swept as they remembered being forced to perform naked in front of Mengele; before the war, they had been circus performers. How delighted Mengele had seemed when they were first brought to him! He had chuckled,

“Now, I have work for twenty years.

In the audience, dozens of twins from Israel, the United States, and around the world listened to the testimonies silently, intently, often tearfully, As for the Mengele family in Germany, if they followed the “trial” of the man they had successfully shielded all his life, they said not a word. Was Rolf Mengele shocked by Moshe Offer’s story of Mengele’s slaughter of his twin brother? Did Karl Heinz, in his office at the Mengele farm-equipment factory in Gunzburg, wince at the accounts of his stepfather’s mutilations and grotesque experiments?

Did Dieter Mengele feel any shame? Did Irene? Did Martha? No available evidence suggests that they did. Indeed, none of the Mengeles, not his son, not his nephews, not his wives, have ever expressed any remorse or any wish to atone for the massive suffering inflicted by their notorious relative. Even Rolf, the most public of the Mengeles and supposedly the most contrite, has been ambiguous and contradictory in his statements.

At the close of the historic three-day proceedings, the tribunal put out a statement Saying,

“There exists a body of evidence justifying the committal for trial of the SS Haupsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele for war crimes and crimes against humanity.” What Taylor and others had been unable to do at Nuremberg, they were attempting to do now.

CANDLES’ pilgrimage to Auschwitz and trial of Mengele galvanized the moribund forty-year hunt for the war criminal. Until 1984, no government had cared enough about Mengele to launch a sustained effort to find him. But now, inspired by the twins’ stories of life in the Mengele barracks, governments and individual Nazihunters competed to find him. Large rewards were proffered for his capture. The West German government, which had done little to pursue Mengele since the 1964 Frankfurt trials, now offered $300,000 for any clues that might lead to him. In California, the Simon Wiesenthal Center posted a reward of $1 million, while in Washington the Washington Times newspaper promised another million dollars. In May, the Israeli government also put up $1 million. By the Spring of 1985, there was a price of nearly $4 million on Mengele’s head.

Enticed by the promise of millions, fortune-hunters took off for the jungles of South America to search for Mengele. Camera crews and squads of television correspondents became a commonplace sight in the most remote parts of Paraguay and Brazil.

The West German and Israeli governments-traditionally distrustful of each other-gingerly began to cooperate to find Mengele.

As neither wanted to share their intelligence with the other, the United States was forced to act as an intermediary. Yet, when officials from the U.S. Department of Justice actually examined the “intelligence” available in the files of the Germans and Israelis, as well as whatever material the CIA possessed, they found it amounted to very little.

There had not been a single reliable sighting of Mengele in over twenty years. There was no recent photograph known for certain to be of him.

Although he was said to be in or around Paraguay, the experts who gathered to discuss the case agreed he could be anywhere. Four decades of sporadic hunts by various individuals had resulted in only a stream of rumors and dead ends. He had become a mythical creature. Fantastic tales-and few facts-about Dr. Mengele abounded.

The Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (051), which was conducting the search for the U.S. government, found itself deluged with an inordinate number of bizarre leads. Mengele was spotted in Las Vegas, in Westchester, and even playing in a marimba band in California. At one point, investigators were again directed to Miami Beach, to the Fontainebleau Hotel, where a clerk swore a man by the name of Mengele had checked in. When 051 officials arrived at the elegant resort, extremely popular with observant Jews, they found a Mr. Mengele was indeed registered. They hurried up to his room, banged on the door, and were greeted by Dieter Mengele-Lolo’s flustered son.

The driving force behind the Justice Department’s inquiry was the memory of the Klaus Barbie investigation, which found that the United States had long been secretly involved with the infamous Butcher of Lyons. Because Mengele had remained at large for so many years and had never been tried, there was a suspicion the United States had helped him, too. But files at the National Archives-which had contained the damning evidence linking Barbie to American intelligence-were sketchy when it came to Mengele. The most intriguing document suggested that Mengele had been interrogated at a prisoner-of-war camp (something He alluded to in the autobiographical novel), then let go. But there was nothing to suggest an active involvement between the Auschwitz doctor and the American postwar government.

Because of the scarcity of solid clues, the German, U.S. and Israeli team of investigators decided the surest way to find Mengele would be through his family. For years, Hans Sedlmeier, the trusted Mengele family assistant, had been suspected of maintaining links with the war criminal. Sedlmeier, who was now living quietly in Gunzburg, had openly admitted helping Mengele years earlier in an interview with American journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber published by The New York Times syndicate in the early 1970s. At the time, Sedlmeier’s admission went unnoticed; no one seemed to care.

A surprise search by German authorities of Sedlmeier’s house in the spring of 1985 uncovered dozens of letters ostensibly from Mengele.

Unbeknown to Sedlmeier, his wife had kept Copies of letters from the war criminal over the years. Searchers also found a notebook with the names and Brazilian addresses of both the Bosserts and the Stammers.

Orders were immediately given to find and interview them. In the course of an interrogation, Liselotte Bossert quickly volunteered that Mengele was dead, and directed searchers to his gravesite.

In June 1985, an international team of forensic experts gathered around the unkempt gravesite in Embu, Brazil, marking the remains of Wolfgang Gerhard. As hundreds of reporters and cameramen watched intently, the experts broke open the casket lid to reveal a grisly heap of bones.

The scientists pulled out a pile of bones, some teeth, a few clumps of hair, and a pair of faded, rotting trousers. The scientists basked in the unprecedented media spotlight. Pressed to come up with instant answers to satisfy the curiosity of the journalists around them, they made rapid determinations based on superficial examinations and incomplete data. The scientists competed with each other for the attention of the television cameras. Within three days, they had declared with “scientific certainty” the remains were those of the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele.

Soon after, Wolfgang and Liselotte Bossert and Gitta Stammer emerged for the first time to talk to the press about their years aiding the Auschwitz doctor. The Bosserts showed several photographs they had kept of the war criminal, and even held up his beloved Burberry raincoat. Former neighbors of Mengele in Sao Paulo also surfaced to talk almost fondly about the private, elegant old man who kept to himself as he took long walks through the dilapidated neighborhood.

Draping herself in the soft white shawl Mengele had given her years before, Elsa Gulpian wistfully recalled her years with the Auschwitz doctor. Elsa told story after story about the gentle old man she had fallen in love with years before, and who had refused to marry her.

Meanwhile, Rolf Mengele also came forward to publicly assert that his father had indeed died in 1979. Rolf released a wealth of papers, diaries, notebooks, and photographs to the German magazine Bunte for publication. There are suspicions that Mengele’s son sought to profit from the publicity surrounding his father’s death. It has been claimed that he became involved in a book deal, and he even sought a Hollywood contract to make a movie about his father.