DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (25 page)

In Vienna, an Auschwitz survivor named Hermann Langbein had vivid memories of the Angel of Death standing at the head of the selection line. As secretary-general of the International Auschwitz Committee, Langbein corresponded with other Holocaust victims and tried to discover the whereabouts of major war criminals. He had always been particularly bothered by the fact that Mengele had eluded the courts-and the gallows. Langbein’s initial attempts to find out where Mengele had gone after the war proved fruitless. Ironically, it was Mengele’s divorce from Irene that enabled Langbein to track down the death-camp doctor to his South American retreat.

Irene and Josef’s divorce papers, which had been filed in a Freiburg court in 1954, had conveniently included a document listing Mengele’s address as Buenos Aires. Clearly, neither Josef nor his family thought it risky anymore to list such revealing information. As it turned out, this was one of the very few mistakes the family made: By uncovering these documents, Langbein ascertained that Mengele was alive and well, and residing in Argentina under his own name.

LEAN STERN: Some people tried to persuade my husband-to-be not to many me because of my past as a Mengele guinea pig. The two of us had met on the ship to Israel, and were friendly before we were romantically involved.

His friends asked him why he was taking a chance settling down with a victim of Mengele’s experiments. They pointed out I might have trouble having children.

But he loved me very much. He was determined to marry me whether I could have children or not.

MENASHE LORINCZI: My future in-laws were very worried about my past as an Auschwitz twin; they wondered whether I was “healthy.”

When I first met my wife, Yaffa, I thought she was so beautiful, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. I wanted to marry her then and there.

My family and I had recently moved to Netanya. She was a native Israeli who had lived in the city all her life. She noticed me because I was the “new boy in town.”

I learned Yaffa was involved with another guy, but that didn’t put me off in the least. I had a friend of mine ask her point-blank if she was serious about the man. She told him she wasn’t. The next day, I asked her out on a date, along with another couple.

At first, we double-dated a lot, or went out in a group. We’d go to the beach, to the theater, to the movies. Although I was in love with her, Yaffa wasn’t sure she wanted to marry me. She came from a very religious background.

As I began turning up at her house more and more often, her parents asked her who I was, and whether my intentions were honorable.

Even after I proposed-and she accepted-new problems creed up.

Yaffa’s parents were worried because I was very skinny, and thought I might be sick because of my time at Auschwitz. I had not talked to them very much about my experiences in the death camp. At that time, survivors kept their mouths shut about the war.

Some people told my wife’s parents I had been at Auschwitz. They were advised to think twice about letting their daughter marry me because of my past as a Mengele twin.

Langbein set about amassing a file on Mengele and his crimes at Auschwitz, in the hope of having him extradited and tried. But when he presented his dossier to the West German government, he found the bureaucrats reluctant to reopen the case. West Germany had been out of the Nazihunting business for years, and not even the possibility of catching the infamous Dr. Mengele could goad them to action.

Langbein persisted, until he finally got a prosecutor in Freiburg interested in the case. Germany issued its first arrest warrant for Mengele on June 7, 1959. The German Foreign Ministry was forced to seek his extradition from Argentina.

This confluence of events persuaded Mengele he could no longer safely remain in Argentina, and that he needed to find a new home for himself, Martha, and Karl Heinz. He settled in Paraguay where his friends in the German community gladly offered him refuge. The future seemed perilous and uncertain-an unpleasant reminder of former days. The Argentine idyll was over. He was on the run once again.

PETER SOMOGYL: One day, our father said we should leave Israel. He had never been able to open a successful business there, as he had in Eastern Europe.

He felt there were better prospects elsewhere.

But I didn’t want to leave Israel. It took a lot of convincing on the part of my father to get me to go.

My twin brother and I went to I,ondon. We applied to emigrate to any country that would take all of us, where we could have a new life.

Canada was our ideal. Our father had decided we would have better opportunities in Canada. He would join us after we were settled somewhere.

Meanwhile, we needed to work to support ourselves in England. It really helped that I had a trade. I got a work permit, and I quickly got a job as an automobile mechanic.

My brother had a harder time. He took odd jobs to earn money while he went to school. At one point, he was a garbage collector at Marks and Spencer.

Both of us hoped and prayed we would get papers to emigrate to Canada.

EVA MOZES: I knew my future husband only ten days when I decided to leave Israel and settle down with him in America.

Mickey was also a Holocaust survivor. Like me, he had lost both his parents in the concentration camps. Although he was originally from Riga, in the Soviet Union, he had settled in Indiana.

I knew his brother, who lived near me in Israel, very well. His family had plotted the match. They had wanted me to meet him, and had prepared me for his visit months before he got to Israel.

When we met, we found we couldn’t even speak the other’s language. I knew very little English; he didn’t know Hebrew. We talked with two dictionaries. But I toured Israel with him, and we managed to have fun.

During the ten days, he pressured me to agree to marry him. I told him,

“Return to the U.S. and we’ll correspondI can’t make a decision that fast.” But he said no; he wanted the relationship to continue, we had to get engaged.

My sister, Miriam, was married and had a baby. All my friends were married. I was twenty-six and still single, which was practically unheard of in those days. My aunt kept pressuring me to say yes.

“Don’t be an old maid,” she’d tell me. “Get a divorce, but get married.”

I was still heartbroken over a recent affair I’d had. Whatever I did, I could not forget the man. What made it worse was that he continued to see me, even though he was married now. He would pop in at any moment.

It was a great love, but I knew it had no future. The thought of leaving Israel was very appealing. There was adventure in traveling to a new place. Going to America seemed wonderful.

I told Mickey,

“Okay, I’m going,” and left Israel on a plane bound for New York.

LEA LoINCzi: In 1959, my husband convinced me to leave Israel and go to America with him. My husband had always wanted to live in the United States-that was his big dream. But he didn’t tell me that until after we were married.

At first, I fought him. I didn’t want to leave my father and my twin brother. But he insisted. “Let us try it,” he told me. “If it doesn’t work out, we can always come back to Israel.”

ZYL THE SAILOR: When I came to Israel, I joined the navy. That was how I came to realize I loved the sea, and decided to become a sailor.

At first, I saw sailing as a means to an end. I knew I had an aunt in America, and I wanted to visit her. Afterwards, I continued to sail because I wanted to run away from Israel, and perhaps from myself And then, I kept sailing because I was used to it and it was an easy life.

When I started sailing, I made plenty of money. The more I made, the more I spent. I was twenty years old, and I thought I was very old.

I led a good life-the life of a vagabond. There were women in every port. We were always getting drunk.

For those who live on land, buying a chair, a table, with the money they earn is a mark of success.

But as a sailor, I spent money simply on having a good time. And that was okay, because you never knew if you would return from the next voyage.

Mengele’s precise movements and whereabouts in the period between 1958 and 1960 are difficult to ascertain: the findings of scholars, journalists, investigators, and intelligence specialists concerning this period are often contradictory. What is known is that as the search for Mengele intensified, he retreated from Argentina to Paraguay, from Paraguay to Brazil, making trips between the three countries before finally finding a safe haven in Paraguay in 1959. The regime of Paraguayan strongman Alfredo Stroessner was even more accommodating to Nazis than Argentina’s had been under Peron. When Mengele applied for Paraguayan citizenship in the fall of 1959, two good friends swore to his worthy character: Werner Jung, head of the local Nazi party, and Captain Alejandro von Eckstein, the White Russian known for his fascist views and who had first been introduced to Mengele by their mutual friend Hans Ulrich Rudel. Both men claimed that Mengele had been in Paraguay for the five-year period requisite for citizenship. Von Eckstein, who had fought in the Chaco Wars under then-Captain Stroessner, was able to draw on his connections with the dictator, enabling Mengele to obtain a Paraguayan ID-under his own name-and become naturalized as a citizen.

Mengele continued to return to Argentina even after he obtained Paraguayan citizenship. He still had substantial interests back in Buenos Aires, including his villa in Olivos and his share in the Fadro pharmaceuticals company, and had to make frequent trips to liquidate his various holdings. He even went back to work at Fadro for a period.

His former coworkers thought he seemed rather glum.

Although in the course of these sojourns there were occasions for the Argentine and German governments to nab him, Mengele remained free.

The Argentines who had provided Mengele a safe haven all these years were certainly not anxious to extradite him. As for the German diplomats in Buenos Aires and Asuncion who were handling Bonn’s requests for information on Mengele, they, too, cast a cold eye on the initiatives to capture the Auschwitz doctor.

Newly declassified files of the U.S. State Department provide a fascinating glimpse of the minuet the German and Argentine governments performed to help out the Angel of Death. According to cables sent by the U.S. embassy back to Washington in June 1959 (while Mengele was shuttling back and forth between Buenos Aires and Asuncion), the German government asked Argentina to begin proceedings to allow Mengele to be extradited. The Argentines coolly replied that their own inquiry had revealed “no record of the subject’s entry into this country.” This was despite the fact that Mengele was listed in the Buenos Aires telephone book under his wife’s name. With remarkable gall, Argentine officials pressed Germany for “additional information” to support their criminal allegations against Mengele.

The Germans didn’t respond until six months later, when they sent Mengele’s address to Argentina. Still, Argentine officials stalled.

Possibly the bureaucrats felt that if they delayed long enough, the extradition request would fall by the wayside. More practically, sympathetic officials may have wanted to give Mengele additional time to arrange his departure. After all, the death-camp-doctor-turned-executive had a great deal of business to attend to in their country.

When they did respond, the Argentines argued there was no formal extradition treaty between their country and Germany, and hence no legal mechanism they could use to accede to the Germans’ request.

Instead, Buenos Aires officials said the case should be submitted to their solicitor general “for a recommendation.” This wasn’t done until June 1960-one full year after Germany’s initial request for extradition. “But by then, Mengele, who had finally been located in this country (Argentina), had disappeared,” read one of the cables from the U.S. embassy. The various delays had given the war criminal more than ample time to plan for his future and to take care of any outstanding business interests. According to an Israeli diplomat who was then assigned to Buenos Aires, Mengele even made a nice profit on the sale of his luxurious villa in Olivos.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: For the first five years I was married, my mother, my husband, and I lived together in a cramped apartment in Haifa. It was awful, the three of us squeezed under one roof But Mother wouldn’t have it any other way.

We could have afforded another apartment for her, but she refused.

She was afraid to live alone.

What made it even worse was the fact that I was working to support us, while my husband was studying at the university. My mother thought it was shocking that a woman would have to go to work. She made it very difficult r me.

I was in conflict the whole time. I was torn between my mother and husband. On the one hand, I wanted to be free, and lead my own life.

On the other hand, I had been brought up that one should feel responsible toward one’s parents. My poor husband had no choice but to accept the situation.

LEA LoRINCzI: We led a hard life at first in the United States. It was very difficult to establish ourselves financially.

Even though my husband didn’t want me to work, I decided to get a job.

Since I couldn’t speak English, I was not able to be a nurse.

Instead, I was hired at a sweater factory. I had to work hard to make ends meet.

I felt very lost. I had left my family, and my new life was very trying.

It took five years before we could afford to go home to Israel.

Hidden away in Paraguay, at the home of his friend Alban Krugg, Mengele was planning his next move. During this period, Martha kept hoping they would resume their life together: she thought Buenos Aires was still safe for all of them. But Mengele, cautious as ever, had no such illusions. He planned to wait until his pursuers either got tired or despaired of being able to find him. His instincts to lay low proved to be absolutely right. By now, the Angel of Death was an expert on avoiding capture.

Even as Mengele retreated out of sight, a small crack team of Israeli agents prepared to nab another ranking Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, the engineer of the Final Solution. They apparently hoped to capture Mengele at the same time. Eichmann was quietly whisked off the streets of Buenos Aires one evening in May 1960 as he returned from work. The agents persuaded Eichmann to tell them Mengele’s address, but by then it was too late. Mengele was safely ensconced in his Paraguayan retreat.