DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (15 page)

But all of Mengele’s twins were in mourning. They grieved not only for their loved ones, but also for their lost childhood, which had been so cruelly snatched away, and would never be recaptured.

ZYL THE SAILOR: As children before the war, my brother and I fought all the time. Our mother would tell us,

“You will cry one day, and it will be too late.”

But I never cried. I know that after the years I spent in the camps, the refugee camps as well as the concentration camps, I could not be a child. Because if ever once I had acted like a child, I would have died.

After Liberation, many different refugee organizations asked me where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do. I decided I had to try to go back to my native village. I hoped I would find my parents, or someone-anyone-I had known.

After about six or seven months, I finally made it back to my hometown, and I met up with my brother. We quickly learned that out of hundreds, thousands, of Jews who had lived there before the war, only one or two had returned.

And absolutely no one from our own family had come back-neither our parents, nor any of our six brothers and sisters. We were the only survivors.

My twin brother and I stood in front of our house and we cried we cried and cried.

And then I remembered my mother’s warning, so many years before-“You will cry, and it will be too late.”

5.

THE TRIAL THAT NEVER WAS JUDITH YAGUDAH.

They were awful, those years between 1945 and 1950.

Mother and I settled in our old hometown. Mother was even able to find some of her old friends, from before the war. All were survivors, and they constantly talked about Auschwitz.

They would talk about the members of the family who had returned, and those who hadn’t. Each family had its wounds. Each family counted its dead. It was awful for me to listen to them.

I was a young girl, but I was much more serious, much more moody, than other girls my own age. I was not like the others. I had trouble concentrating in school. It was very hard for me to study.

In the beginning, I thought about my sister, Ruthie, a lot. But then, less and less. Life has to go on, I guess.

But Mother took the loss of Ruthie very badly. She had been a doting mother of twins. She came back with only one child: It broke her heart. For one year, she did not go out anywhere. Mother was a young woman after the war, but she never remarried.

Irene Shoenbein Mengele cut a striking figure as she walked the streets of Gunzburg, tall and sorrowful, her blond hair glistening against her black mourning clothes. Contemporaries recall how well she took to the role of war widow, how convincingly mournful she looked.

Not yet thirty, Mengele’s wife was still young and attractive, with that tall, blond, buxom beauty that had made her such a desirable mate to her race-conscious husband. As she walked, holding little Rolf by the hand, it was said in the Bavarian town that she caught the eye of several of the young men. But Autenried and Gunzburg held no charm for her, and even though she was well-provided-for by the Mengeles, she was anxious to return to her beloved Freiburg, famine or no famine.

Although the Mengele family knew by the late summer of 1945 that Josef was alive, they had decided to pretend he was missing and apparently dead. This was clearly the easiest way to fend off troublesome inquiries. The ongoing searches for war criminals and the proximity of the U.S. Occupation forces was a constant source of anxiety.

The Mengeles could only hope that with tens of thousands of Nazis on the wanted lists-many of them far more prominent than their Beppo-investigators would be only too glad to strike off another name as missing or dead.

For the Mengeles, protecting Josef became both a game and an obsession.

By a strange twist of fate, American forces decided sometime in 1945 to move into the Mengele mansion. The family rushed over to the villa, and while pretending to collect family valuables, they scooped up any photographs of Josef that were lying around the house.

There were quite a few; the brilliant young doctor was the pride of the Mengeles.

An investigation by the Justice Department some forty years later would reveal that the American occupiers developed a pleasant rapport with the caretakers of the mansion and the Mengele clan in Gunzburg.

They apparently never thought to interrogate the Mengeles or search for clues that could lead them to the scientist-torturer of Auschwitz.

The Americans stationed in Gunzburg “may not have realized who Mengele was, and the magnitude of his war crimes,” according to historian David Marwell, who conducted the Justice Department probe. One day, a fire broke out at the Mengele factory. The U.S. commander personally rushed over to help put it out.

In fairness to the American forces, the man who would later emerge as the world’s most wanted Nazi killer was considered a small fish immediately after the war. The British, Americans, Poles, and Russians who were conducting the manhunts wanted to punish the individuals whom they felt were responsible for the war machine. Many of the most prominent of Hitler’s henchmen-such as SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, his second in command, Reinhard Heydrich, and Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels-were already dead. But even compared to the surviving architects of Germany’s reign of terror, like the minister of war production, Albert Speer, or Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Auschwitz death-camp doctor seemed a minor player.

The officials who were putting together the first major war-crimes trials decided to start by prosecuting the Nazis who had ordered the death camps to be built, not merely those who had worked in them.

The trials were to be held in November 1945 in Nuremberg, the birthplace of the original 1933 racial laws Mengele had so admired.

The Office of the U.S. Chief Counsel for War Crimes, in charge of overseeing the trials, sent out its own investigative teams to scour the German countryside for wanted Nazis. Because of the need to begin as quickly as possible and the vast number of war criminals still at large, there was a hurried, haphazard nature to the manhunts. The teams were also hampered by the utter chaos of postwar Germany: even back then, it was common knowledge that major war criminals were slipping out of the country.

As Benjamin Ferencz, then a twenty-five-year-old attorney running the Berlin Office of the U.S. Chief Counsel for War Crimes, later recalled, the emphasis was on speed. Once a Nazi was caught, a case against him was hastily prepared, paving the way for a trial.

The opening of the International Military Tribunals sparked worldwide interest. In the course of the next two years, twelve Nazis who had been far more powerful than Josef Mengele were sentenced to die for their crimes against humanity. Three others received life sentences, four were given jail terms of ten to twenty years, and three were acquitted. One of the most notorious of Hitler’s cronies, Martin Bormann, was tried and sentenced to death in absentia. Even though the trials had been put together in a slapdash way, by young and often inexperienced prosecutors, they ultimately did achieve their desired result-the punishment of the leaders of the Third Reich. Some of those men stiffly took the stand and argued they had only “followed orders.”

Others, like Heann Goring, committed suicide rather than face the public reckoning.

MOSHE OFFER: I didn’t want to live after I came out of the camps. I couldn’t bear the notion that my entire family was gone.

After Liberation, I developed all sorts of nervous ailments. I began having fits. I had trouble sleeping. I couldn’t concentrate. The doctors said it was the result of all the experiments I had undergone at Mengele’s hands.

I also began to have problems with my memory. There was a lot that I couldn’t remember-a lot that I did not want to remember, I guess.

I was completely broken down, completely sick. I felt I did not have the courage to continue living. I was always thinking about Tibi, about how he had died, about the horrible tests and surgeries Mengele had performed on him. I could not get over what had happened to Tibi, how they had taken him away from me. I could not get over the death of my twin brother.

I could not get out of my mind all that Mengele had done.

Mengele, safely ensconced in his Mangolding hideout, viewed the Nurernberg proceedings with unvarnished contempt. In his autobiographical novel, first begun as his memoirs and later “fictionalized” by his changing of the characters’ names, the protagonist likens the trials to “political theater.” Nuremberg, says Andreas-Mengele’s persona-is nothing but a “farce,” a feeding frenzy for a world exultant at seeing Germany brought to its knees. The former death-camp doctor apparently saw no value in punishing the worst offenders of the Hitler regime, for in his opinion they had done nothing wrong except to lose the war. During one of his many monologues about the proceedings, Andreas excuses Hitler’s actions, saying he “only did what others before him had done.”

Mengele’s name was mentioned a number of times during the Nuremberg deliberations. The former commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolph Hess, briefly discussed Mengele’s death-camp career, stating that he had conducted experiments on twins. A former Auschwitz inmate, Marie-Vaillant Claude Couturier, described Mengele’s cheerful, effortless way of performing selections, his habit of whistling classical tunes, and, of course, his obsessive interest in twins.

A perusal of Mengele’s writings (in addition to his novel, he left behind diaries and notebooks) indicates that Mengele remained unrepentant, a steadfast Nazi. To the end, he remained convinced of the necessity and importance of Germany’s actions. Bitter and angry over his country’s defeat, he even mused about ways to start a resistance movement to oust the American Occupation forces. But he knew it was a lost cause. The German people might have felt loyal to the Third Reich, but they were not about to risk more death and devastation to bring it back.

Nor was Mengele disturbed by the scope of the crimes against the Jews that was revealed during the trials. To the contrary, he resented the world’s uproar over details of the Final Solution, and justified the existence of the death camps. Mengele felt the Jews were to blame for the war, and hence for the cruel fate they later encountered. In his novel, his hero says the Jews had pushed the Allies into fighting Germany by spreading false propaganda about the Nazis. “Hitler warned Jews in his speech in 1939 not to stir up the people with war against Germany, that it could end up badly,” his protagonist, Andreas, tells a friend. Spouting classic antiSemitic dogma, he decries the inter nationality of the Jews and their supposed links with the intelligence services of other countries. “This fact alone would be enough to take measures such as the concentration camps.” As “potential enemies of the state,” the Jews had to be killed.

PETER SOMOGYL: The Communist regime in Hungary became increasingly hostile to the Jews: It considered us “class enemies.” The government knew anti semitism was on the rise, but nothing was done to stop it.

The new rulers simply did not like the Jews.

In the first months after the war, my twin brother and I assumed our father had died. We had no idea what had become of him: that he had been interned at Dachau.

Then, in July, we got the news that he was alive. Afler Dachau, he hadn’t wanted to return to Hungary. He was certain that his entire family was dead. But someone told him that his sons were alive, and so he returned to our hometown.

Father showed up in Pecs in August 1945. We hugged and kissed.

He asked us many questions, but we were very reluctant to answer him.

We didn’t want to tell him what had happened to our mother and sister.

We started our life yet again. The three of us moved back to our old house. We cleaned the place up and bought new furniture. My father opened a store selling automobile parts-exactly like before the war.

In other words, we tried to pick up the pieces.

But our lives were marred by the political upheaval around us.

Hungary was very turbulent. There was one regime after another. Then the Communists took over. It was stable-but extremely difficult for the Jews.

Father, who was very clever, was quickly able to make a success of his business. But then a Communist group inside our school decided that we were too rich. It was the old brand of antiSemitism. Once again, the Jews had too much money. We were charged higher tuition than the other students.

The other kids ganged up on my brother and me. They called us “capitalists”-the new insult. The children had inherited the anti Jewish feelings from their parents. They had been raised to believe that Jews were evil.

I was dragged into school court. I was told that I was not a true member of the proletariat. I was accused of being a capitalist landowner-even though my father owned no land.

Then, we were even subjected to the old, prewar insult: Dirty Jew

EVA MOZES: After we realized no one in our family had survived, Miriam and I went to live with an aunt in Cluj.

This aunt had lost both her husband and her twenty-six-year-old son in the war. She was always in mourning for her son. We could not possibly replace him. She never gave us a hug, or kissed us.

Miriam and I busied ourselves with schoolwork and tried to forget the war.

When the Communists were taking hold of Romania, we became very involved with the Communist party. We joined the Young Pioneers in my school, and because Miriam and I got along very well with the Communists, they put us in charge of our school’s Communist party.

We were called

“Pioneer leaders.”

The Communists made us feel very special. They spoke about freedom and liberty. They would talk about the horrible Germans, the crimes of the Fascists. It all sounded wonderful. I felt very good about Communism.

But then some rumors began circulating around Cluj that a Jewish vampire was sucking the blood of Christian children.

After that, life in Romania became much more difficult.

LEA LORINCzI: We began to suffer under the Communists.