DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN (33 page)

LEAH STERN: I was invited one year to attend a wedding in America. A dear friend of mine was getting married, and I decided I had to go.

My daughter accompanied me to the airport to see me off She kept walking with me, but then we came to the gate, and the security officers wouldn’t let her go any farther.

My daughter started waving and shouting,

“Mommy, mommy.

And I fainted. At that moment, everything came back to me.

I heard my mother crying,

“Wait for me, wait for me,” as she was separated from us at Auschwitz.

Rolf returned to Germany, having obtained his father’s blessing to marry Almuth. Mengele had even used most of the pittance left of his savings to purchase a ring for his son’s future bride. After Rolf’s departure, Mengele deteriorated considerably. Often in pain, he spent much of his time in bed. He wrote obsessively. The daily entries in his diary became longer and longer, crammed with increasingly mundane details. Restless and unable to sleep, he read late into the night.

At a time when Mengele’s life was filled with little more than complaints, a major change occurred: He fell in love. The object of his affections was a lowly Brazilian servant, nearly forty years his junior.

Elsa Gulpian, who became his housekeeper in 1976, at around the time of his stroke, was worlds apart from his first wife, Irene, and she possessed neither the elegance nor the glamour of Martha. Young and impoverished, Elsa was the type of woman the Josef of old wouldn’t have deigned to notice. Yet, she was sweet and charming and utterly servile. She was also one of the few people able to get along with him.

Elsa has recalled that the Auschwitz doctor-who she knew only as Senor Pedro-courted her with earnest ardor. As their relationship deepened, he pleaded with her to live with him. She refused; she wanted a wedding ring. But Mengele didn’t consider telling his maid that he was technically already married. Although he had been separated from Martha for nearly twenty years, the marriage had never been legally dissolved. But there may have been other factors at play.

However lonely and miserable he might have been, perhaps Dr. Mengele could not stoop to marrying a servant girl.

Their courtship didn’t progress to a physical stage. It remained as pure as a soft white shawl Mengele gave her. Mengele admired Elsa’s modesty and old-fashioned values, if only because he shared them. In his old age, the mass murderer of Auschwitz was adhering to a strict moral code. In his notebooks, he often criticized modern sexual mores, elaborating on what he felt was the “proper” conduct between men and women. Like a preacher, he railed against promiscuity and “perversion.” The sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s made him intensely uncomfortable. “Sexual barriers prevent chaos and stabilize hereditary laws,” he proclaimed in one entry. But he also observed, somewhat ambiguously, that it was fine for men and women to enjoy “a normal expression of passion.”

Elsa, who had been raised a devout Catholic, continued to hope for a marriage proposal. But when she realized it would never be, the sensible girl became engaged to someone else. Mengele was devastated.

Elsa’s action was seen as a personal betrayal-even though he had prompted the breakup by refusing to mary her.

Mengele’s increasingly strange compulsions distanced him even from loyal admirers such as the Bosserts. As Wolfgang later confessed in a letter to the Gunzburg clan, both he and his wife came to limit their contacts with the old Nazi, even though they liked him. Mengele, who ironically was on his best behavior with the Bosserts, was threatening to destroy their lives with his obsessive habits and arbitrary commands. He “demanded comformity of everyone,” Bossert wrote.

“Whoever didn’t manage to keep his own head would be overrun by Mengele, until he lost his own sense of identity.

“That was why, Bossert said apologetically, a “constant tie” was impossible. “It was important for us to be somewhat distant. .

With Gerhard gone and the Bosserts restricting their get-tog ethers Mengele became more homesick than ever. Even after twenty years, Brazil was a foreign land, which he viewed through the prism of his own boundless misery and despair. Mengele never learned to love the country, or its spirited inhabitants; he never appreciated its music or its culture. He spoke Portuguese, but only grudgingly. The sole concession he made was to admire the rich, dazzling Brazilian countryside.

Expressions of joy are rare in Mengele’s diaries, especially the later ones, and nonexistent in his letters home. It is as if the aged Nazi wanted to elicit sympathy from his relatives by dwelling on his pain.

Birthdays continued to go unnoticed: One year, he noted cryptically that “a visitor is making this sad day much more bearable.”

Another year, Bossert surprised him with a cake and hearty dinner -but “unfortunately, no letters.” As old as he was, Mengele had remained a little boy inside, longing for the fanfare of his privileged youth, when March 16 had invariably meant lots of presents, love, and attention.

He tried hard to repair his relations with the new generation of Mengeles. Although he was close to Karl Heinz, he had virtually no dealings with Lolo’s son, Dieter. He worried that they might harbor suspicions about his past. Because he couldn’t go to Germany, he relied on trusted emissaries to keep the young family members firmly on his side. Once, Mengele asked Gerhard to visit his family in Gunzburg and tell his relatives what a fine person he was. “I would like for them to meet you, and for you to tell them what is both good and bad about me,” he wrote in a letter sent before the planned encounter.

“This way, we can avoid the misunderstandings and the ignorance, the mistakes and the negative attitudes.” Josef Mengele knew he was loathed and reviled by the entire world. Yet in his old age, he longed to redeem himself in the eyes of a few admirers in Brazil and his family in Gunzburg. Dr. Mengele wanted to be looked upon compassionately.

He portrayed himself as a lonesome exile, condemned to a life of penury and solitude. He was not an evil, ruthless murderer, but a victim.

Mengele’s last complete diary, for 1978, reads twice as long as any of the others. A whiny tone pervades the manuscript, written in barely legible script. Every entry compulsively begins with a report on the day’s weather, followed by a description of his latest physical ailment.

In between the headaches and dizzy spells, stomachaches, earaches, and sense of fatigue, there are constant remarks about feeling depressed and defeated.

Mengele was racked with pain and tormented by loneliness, and that is perhaps the central theme of the late diary entries. But there is a sub theme as well, for woven into the text of the 1978 journal is his disapproving dissection of postwar global popular culture. He condemns the local obsession with South American soccer scores. He rails against a jazz festival he sees on late-night television as “musical schizophrenia.” With contempt, he tells of a pair of visiting lesbians from the Galapagos Islands. With finality, he labels the brilliant German autobiographical war novel Dos Boot as “pornography masquerading as politics.” He watches the heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ah and Leon Spinks, two black men, and dismisses it with disdain as “a symbol of the stupefied mass culture.” Only one popular icon wins his admiration, an American actress in an obscure movie role, and while Mengele does not mention her film by name, he does write that it is the only picture he has ever seen starring Marilyn Monroe.

Mengele’s insomnia now lasted for days and weeks on end, making him constantly edgy and exacerbating his physical discomfort. “I am losing hope that I will improve or heal in the future,” he writes in one entry. “It is the filth week of suffering through the days and nights without sleep.”

MOSHE OR: I sleep very little-two-and-a-half three hours is a lot for me. I often find myself pacing the house in the middle of the night, while everyone else is sleeping.

I get up and go to another room so I won’t disturb my wife. I get up at four o’clock in the morning, to be at work by five o’clock. I work very hard-twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. I like to work hard-because then I can drive myself to a point of such exhaustion that I simply collapse and sleep a little bit.

I have terrible problems with my nerves. If I have the slightest problem at work, I can’t sleep at all. I can only sleep when I am absolutely exhausted.

HEDVAH AND LEAK STERN: We have trouble sleeping. We can’t seem to fall asleep, and we depend on pills. Usually, a Valium or two helps.

MIRIAM MOZES: I take medicine to go to sleep. Or else, I would get up and cry.

Mengele’s unrelenting loneliness was relieved only by visits from Elsa, with whom Mengele had managed to preserve a friendship.

Although happily married, the young Brazilian woman seemed to genuinely care for the old death-camp doctor. She watched over him, attended to his needs as best she could, and provided him with news about mutual acquaintances. Mengele thoroughly enjoyed talking with her. “Her childish, primitive opinions are touching,” he observed in his diary.

The rare times Mengele did venture outside, his neighbors saw the same elegant old gentleman they had known for years. Just as he had in his youth, he continued to pay meticulous attention to his appearance.

Through the shabby streets of Sao Paulo, Mengele walked around in a Burberry raincoat. His matching Burberry hat was pulled low over his forehead, as a security precaution.

Although he was ailing, Mengele worked urgently to finish the autobiographical record he had begun so many years ago. Looking back with longing to the Nazi era of his youth, he complained that the “real values-race, nation, class, and social status” had been destroyed.

As he wrote of his past, he often became nostalgic. Thoughts of his mother, the indomitable Walburga Mengele, returned to haunt him.

HEDVAH STERN: Recently, memories of my mother have come back to haunt me. I find myself thinking,

“If Mother were here, life would be better for me.”

I am always thinking about her.

LEAH STERN: It is especially bad during the strawberry season. Every time I see strawberries, I remember Mother’s dress when she left us.

It was black, with a strawberry print on it. I think of her constantly during the strawberry season.

ZYL THE SAILOR: My mother is the person I think about the most. To be honest, I don’t remember any of the other members of my family. I don’t think I could even tell you the names of all my dead brothers and sisters. I can’t remember what they looked like. But always, my mother is on my mind.

I think it was because she was the one who held the family together.

When I was little, my father went off to war. She was the one who took care of all of us.

The first years I came to Israel, I discovered an uncle in Tel Aviv -my mother’s brother. He told me there was a woman in Netanya who had been a close friend of my mother. And so, those first few years, I was constantly visiting this woman. She had a photograph of my mother as a young girl. I went all the time to talk to her, to ask her questions, to look at this photograph.

LEA LORINCZI: I was always looking for my mother-in Eastern Europe, in Israel, even in America. I would walk through the streets and look at the people. I would stare at the crowds of older women, and for a moment I would spot someone I thought looked like her. “Maybe it is her,” I would think.

You always read stories about someone who survived the war, and shows up after many years.

MENASHE LORINCZI: Recently, we heard of a couple who were reunited after forty years. They met by chance in a hotel in Tiberias. Each one had thought the other was dead.

ALEX DEKEL: One day, when I was showing my American fiancee Jaffa, we passed an Arab graveyard. Immediately, I stooped down and began pulling up the weeds. She wanted to know why I was doing this-this irrational, violent tugging. “Maybe someone will do this for my mother’s grave, I told her. Whenever I see an untended grave, it’s hard for me not to pull up the weeds.

MIRIAM MOZES: After the war, I kept thinking,

“Maybe Mother is still alive.” I never knew what happened to her. There was no record of when she or my father died. I kept hoping, I kept imagining somehow that she had survived. And this went on for years and years and years.

I would see a middle-aged woman on the street in Tel Aviv and I would think,

“Maybe she is my mother.”

One day, as he listened to a Schubert album, Mengele remembered how fond his mother had been of that particular composition, Opus 6. As a little boy, he had surprised her as she was sobbing one day while listening to the melancholy piece, and had asked her why she was so sad. “Boy, you cannot understand that yet,” his mother had replied.

Listening to the Schubert album now, a dejected, tired old man, Mengele felt he knew what his mother had meant. “I understand better now, Mother,” he wrote in a diary entry dated May 1978.

One weekend in February 1979, Mengele was invited to the Bosserts’ cottage in Bertioga Beach. Although it would mean fun and relaxation, he kept delaying the trip. He seemed especially distracted that day, unable to complete even the simplest tasks. Finally, at three o’clock in the morning, Mengele left his Sao Paulo residence for the beach house.

From the moment he arrived, he turned what should have been a pleasant weekend into a nightmare. As the Bosserts would later recall both in letters to his Gunzburg relatives and in interviews with the press, Mengele talked incessantly about his terrible lot in life. Although Wolfgang tried to soothe him, he was not to be silenced. On and on he rambled about his life in exile-the servants who did not serve, the primitive country so unlike his beloved Germany, the boorish population with its nonexistent cultural life. These were ideas Bossert had heard him spout hundreds of times-but never perhaps with the same degree of desperation. Mengele confided that even after twenty years in Brazil, he still felt like a stranger.

The next morning, Mengele seemed calmer. But his hands shook at the breakfast table, and he spilled some coffee on himself. “This is what happens when you talk with your hands,” he said jokingly to the children. He eagerly joined all outing to the mountains, and insisted on climbing unassisted. When He complained of feeling tired, his friends gently reminded him he was getting on in years, and should slow down. “I am not really that old,” sixty-eight-year-old Mengele scoffed indignantly.