The Birthday Buyer (8 page)

Shove, knock down, terrorize, beat, disembowel, spit on, open up, slash, insult, tear apart, aim at, shoot, execute, nail down, throw down, dismember, hang, crush, decapitate, inject, trepan, disfigure, amputate, triturate, burn, strike, stab, electrocute, rape, infect, torture, deceive, drill, inflate, behead, cut, skewer, bury, strangle, beat and tear apart are verbs the Nazis applied to children.

I don’t know how much blood from children in Auschwitz and other camps was used for transfusions for the wounded of Stalingrad and other eastern fronts, but it was a lot. The biggest real act of vampirism in the whole of history. Erika’s Foundation opened a line of investigation into the use of children who were forced to be “providers” of blood and skin for people with burns. The dossiers were labelled
TRANSFUSIONS
or
GRAFTS
. The doctors in Auschwitz began to siphon blood from many children and adolescents, when there began to be a general shortage in Germany from 1942. It was considered wasteful to send them to the gas chambers without making use of their blood and their skin that was used in grafts needed by soldiers who’d suffered serious burns, whose faces, arms and legs needed reconstructing for aesthetic reasons. Didn’t the Reich make use of the clothes, hair and teeth of the undesirables it was gassing? Well, why not get blood from children, from the healthiest—they won’t be needing it! It was clearly reasoning based on a sound grasp of logic and economics.

In 1943 many of these children were moved to field hospitals, where they were shot dead as soon as they’d done with them, then buried in trenches that had been abandoned or blown open by mortar fire. For many years people believed that those children had died according to the usual Auschwitz procedures.

The idea was Josef Mengele’s, better known in the camp as the Angel of Death, and it came to him as a result of a vision inspired by a crucifix his mother Walburga had given him. Walburga Mengele was extremely religious and brought her three children up to be strictly observant Roman Catholics on the farm where they were born in Günzburg in central Bavaria. She gave each of them a mother-of-pearl crucifix that Josef always carried with him, that had been blessed by the Bishop of Ulm, the nearby regional capital and a city that Ahasver, the wandering Jew, once visited, something the Mengele family probably didn’t know. The blood running down Christ’s body on the cross gave him the idea when he was a lieutenant on the Ukraine front in 1941. He traveled across the Ukraine as commanding officer of a terrible
SS Einsatzkommando
. It isn’t difficult to imagine his batallion cleaning out villages and surrendering to the orgies of extermination that film-maker Elem Klimov recreates so admirably, so starkly in his films. His ideas about using the blood of children and adolescents were immediately backed by Himmler and Eichmann, who used to receive his absurd reports on the unheard-of genetic possibilities opened up by his experiments in the terrain of human inheritance. He started to put them into practice in 1943 when he reached Auschwitz as a doctor to carry out his experimentation on the impurity of inferior, non-Aryan races.

His name still makes my hair stand on end and even more so when I see photos of him as an old man in Paraguay in the 1970s. Ever since I began to watch documentaries on the Second World War, one name has always terrified me: Mengele. There is something primitive about the three euphonious syllables of his name, as if he were a kind of monstruous, if not unreal, wizard. And yet, just like Adolf Eichmann, he was a man who looked ordinary and was cold and calculating in a methodical, mean way.

Even more primitive for me in this German hospital, where I feel at the mercy of doctors I don’t trust, who I know I’m ludicrously satanizing, like the dreadful Voghs (he’s probably a good guy, I’m sure he is), doctors with a priestly streak like Mengele, capable of experimenting on me, coldly and cruelly, like Mengele, who thought that his human guinea pigs were degraded, worthless beings. And consequently I am really distressed to be in Frankfurt, marooned like a ship without sails, in that city where Mengele studied and graduated in Medicine in the summer of 1938, the year when he enlisted in the evil
Schutzstaffel
, more lethally known as the SS. He was 28 and aspired to broaden the scope of German science.

Josef Mengele was barely a doctor aspiring to a future in the Third Reich when he met the man who was to be his protector and patron, Professor Otmar von Verschuer, director of the Kaiser William Berlin Institute for Anthropology and an influential member of the National-Socialist Party. Von Verschuer opened the doors to the fantasies of genetic experimentation: Hitler’s slogan about purifying the race needed a solid, indisputable, and above all, scientific base, and the young doctor decided to devote himself tirelessly to that end. He had been summoned to
create
a whole new race, the thousand-year race, and that was much more sublime and less tawdry than purifying it.

Thanks to his military merits—he was decorated with the First Class Iron Cross for his
cleansing actions
in the Ukraine—Mengele ensured that Auschwitz was given over to him as one huge laboratory where he would have complete freedom to carry out his experiments. And he took his responsibility seriously as a scientist who must carry out genuine
field work
and descended into that infected pool of filth, that sewer of Jews, where it was unpleasant though necessary to work, although, as he recognized, it was also an extremely exciting challenge for a man of science. It was the price to pay for the universal prestige he was sure would be his.

He was brutal.

He experimented on some 3,000 children, mainly Jews and gypsies, of which barely 200 survived in a chronically sick or deformed state. On the basis of a cursory glance as soon as the trains reached Auschwitz, the tireless Mengele made his own selection of the children he deemed suitable for his research, and put to his left or his right those he chose for the infirmary barrack in Camp B or to send straight to the gas chambers.

Mengele’s great speciality was physical pain. More specifically, his experiments focused on physical pain as suffered by children. He wanted to know everything on the subject and experimented collaterally with thresholds of pain, inasmuch as he practised on twins in order to try out perverted, unlikely techniques of genetic engineering. To that end he carried out arbitrary castrations of twin girls without anaesthetics, and thus achieved two experiments in one: he studied their genitals, almost always without proper technical means or medical preparation, in order to analyze manifestations of pain, such as screams, contractions, exudations, despair, fainting, shaking and stiffness, among others.

One can conceive of no greater cruelty or sadism than the dissections that he, with the help of other camp doctors, carried out on children who died suffering the greatest pain. Or lunatic experiments in which he injected two or three-year-old children with huge quantities of petrol or phenol to ascertain how long and in what state blood clots in the human body under the impact of synthetic, embalming liquids. Or stomach operations carried out without anesthetics, simply to study why entrails occupy such and such a place in the body and not some other.

Mengele didn’t perform by himself. He undertook and completed his experiments with the connivance, praise and real assistance he received from the doctors and nurses of Auschwitz, some of whom were proud to be invited by Mengele to associate their names with the advances for the future of science, like Koenig, who was interested in experimenting sadistically on dwarves. But that future was neither grandiose nor glorious. Mengele had to flee from Auschwitz on January 17, 1945 and hide on his farm in Günzburg as an ordinary laborer. He then entered a monastery where he stayed under a false identity until 1949 when he made it to Argentina without too much difficulty. His death, whenever it happened, came as insufficient pay for the horror he left behind him. There is, or was, in the Erika Fisherkant Foundation a huge archive of hundreds of cases that are still open and it was labeled:
JOSEF MENGELE, TORMENTOR
.

I discovered that in a village in eastern Poland, Piasky put naked children in cages that he then buried while they were still alive.

I discovered that a child was thrown from a truck onto a street in Lublin by his mother so he could escape. A German soldier picked him up by the leg and threw him violently against the wheels of another oncoming truck. The child died, run over in full view of his mother.

I discovered they split open many children’s heads against rocks and tree trunks. It was common practice and saved on ammunition and unnecessary effort.

I discovered that in some towns in the Ukraine the
Waffen SS
—to which Mengele belonged—would organize a big spectacle by building a big bonfire into the flames of which they threw live children in front of their parents. A child ran out of one of these bonfires, screaming horribly, hair and hands on fire. They forced him back into the fire with a pitchfork.

I discovered that many children from Gorlice, in Galicia, had their heads smashed by blows from rifle butts, while those doing it tried to outdo one another seeing who could shout the loudest, in a soldierly sporting competition. They did it with such might that brains flew everywhere.

I discovered they beat children with their fists until they lost consciousness.

I discovered that they let some parents in Krakow choose between strangling their children themselves or allowing them to be skewered on bayonets. Most felt compelled to kill their children with their own hands.

I discovered that they made children in Treblinka walk in columns for hours until they were exhausted. They shot in the head any who dropped behind from exhaustion.

I discovered that in towns in Russia and Byelorussia, in the places they chose to carry out mass executions, they broke the children’s spines by beating them with wooden stakes. They took several hours to die.

I discovered that German mothers dressed their children in clothing that came from the dead bodies of Jewish children.

I wonder what state Hurbinek’s collarbone must have been in and how long Dr. Mengele examined it before he discarded him, that January morning when an SS medical officer, a
Lagerarzt
, walked into the Ka-Be—the initials used to refer to the camp infirmaries, that were called
Krankenbau
—with the two-and-a-half, perhaps even three-year-old baby, perhaps even on his birthday, the last birthday he would ever have. He must have found him in a double wall in one of the barracks or perhaps someone handed him over in exchange for a last-minute favor. Rather than kill him, the
Lagerarzt
thought of Mengele’s scientific work.

Perhaps it happened like that or perhaps it didn’t. At any rate, neither Primo Levi, nor Henek, nor Franz Patzold, nor anyone else, could ever have known since the prisoners didn’t know about Mengele’s experiments. But the number tattooed on his small arm could be explained by that visit to Mengele’s infirmary. That number on the arm of a three-year-old child was proof that he had passed through one of the
Selektzie
, selections made by the Angel of Death. Consequently, the answer to the question Levi asks about the pain Hurbinek suffered before reaching the barrack that brought them all together might be that the child was kept alive, like a guinea pig, in Mengele’s cages.

The injection of a small dose of petrol, depending where it is made, can lead to permanent paralysis, because the whole area of body affected is rendered useless. To ensure the remaining blood doesn’t clot, a rapid puncture or deep cut must be implemented in the section above the injected area, to prevent septicemia. When Mengele observed Hurbinek’s collarbone and that white gap, almost a membrane next to the skinny neck, he considered possibly injecting carbolic acid. He was sure the immediate clotting of the blood in the brain would trigger a muscular spasm throughout the body. He’d read in a book about neurology that was what happened to rats. Perhaps it also happened to men as well, and perhaps even to children?

However, he had a change of mind. Thus, Hurbinek’s paralysis wouldn’t derive from a limited injection of petrol, as it had gelled in Mengele’s mind for a few minutes. Hurbinek’s paralized legs, the uselessness of his organs from the waist down, would derive from one of Mengele’s stupid experiments that consisted in separating out vertebrae by inserting a wedge made of the bone from another child’s vertebra in the spine, the purpose being to see what would be the level of acceptance and what side effects might be produced by the contact between the two different bones. These most peculiar experiments on the backbone formed part of Mengele’s favorite operations. He believed—absurdly—that the key to purifying races resided in the backbone.

A few minutes after Mengele’s savage surgical operation, little Hurbinek was strapped on a bunk and placed under observation without food. His screams died down and gave way to the terror that silenced him and made him shake. They left him there to die; Mengele refused to waste bullets.

I discovered that when they were destroying the ghettos in cities, on a whim, they lifted children up by the neck and threw them violently down from windows and balconies of high flats, or down stairwells.

I discovered that sometimes, when the SS were in a hurry, they strangled children where they found them.

I discovered that in the city of Grodno, the Germans helped the children to strip, then shot them in the back of the neck, one by one.

I discovered that they snatched babies from their mothers’ arms, grabbing them by a leg, and threw them violently into the lorries, thus breaking their necks.

I discovered that two or three SS would violently pull apart one-year-old babies.

I discovered that in the Chelmno camp they would hang children in front of their parents.

I discovered that in the village of Svisloc they threw the babies up in the air so that others, in the spirit of a clay pigeon shoot, could fire at them while they hurtled through the air. They then fell into the ditches where they had placed their wounded mothers to be buried once they had watched that macabre game of target practice.