Authors: Anna Scanlon
I gulped. Did they think I was crazy too? Would they call the police and simply have me carted away to the nearest mental institution? Instead of a look of panic, their faces seemed calm, reassuring.
"I used to have hallucinations," Zoltan said nodding his head. "I'd get up and scream in the middle of the night and Roza would find me in the middle of the street with a butcher knife in my hands. I almost slashed her a couple of times, thinking she was the Arrow Cross or the SS."
"So you don't think I'm crazy?" I asked, my eyes wide.
"You were in Auschwitz," Zoltan said shaking his head. "No matter what anyone says, no one understands unless they were there. Sometimes I feel like having Roza check me into one of those places, but I just try to focus on something else instead."
"Does it work?"
He shrugged.
"I don't know."
I swallowed hard, looking to my right where the picture of Hajna was sitting on the mantle. Somehow, he had managed to capture her impish grin, her slightly more upturned nose, how she was always on the edge of bursting out into uncontrollable giggles. She was alive, just how I wanted to remember her.
"Why don't we call your aunt," Roza suggested. "She must be worried sick about you."
"Will you let her take me away?"
Roza exchanged glances with Zoltan, their matching green eyes lingering on one another for a moment.
"Can't you just let me live with you? Please?! I don't want someone else to send me away. I'm through with being sent away."
I could feel myself getting desperate, my cheeks flushing. Sweat dripped down the back of my dress, even though it wasn't particularly hot.
"We can't do that," Roza shook her head. "But we can maybe tell your aunt you'd like to see Zoltan. You could see him for a little bit before they send you away. Maybe like a compromise?"
I nodded, contemplating the idea.
"But I broke all of my aunt's candy dishes. I was so….so mad. I was so scared."
Zoltan nodded his head. He understood, I could see it in his deep-set emerald eyes.
"I've broken things, too, when I've been upset. It's okay. You're a smart girl."
I could feel a blush forming on my cheeks.
"Thank you."
It was the first time since Hungary anyone had called me smart. The nuns had written in my file that I was uncooperative and slow. The teachers at school used words like "a little retarded" thinking I couldn't understand them. But I knew, I knew what they meant. Because I couldn't speak English, because I was so wounded, they had lumped me in with the kids who had been born unable to communicate.
"What's your name?" Roza asked, bending down next to me. She stroked my hair down to my back, the way my mother used to when I was worried about something.
"Stern Aliz," I nodded. "At least that's my name in Hungary. Here it's turned around or something."
Zoltan let out a little laugh, shuffling his feet.
"They do tend to do that here, don't they?"
I smiled. My heart began to settle. Maybe I could go on, knowing there were people like me trying to run from their memories. Maybe I would live my whole life running from them. I had only known Zoltan for a little while, but I knew if he was by my side, I could at least give it a try.
Days crept by and years flew. The world's mouth was tightly sealed, their ears sewn shut. No one wanted to hear about Auschwitz. The world wasn't ready to face their guilt. But I had Zoltan. With him I could just sit and he knew.
I wish I could say after meeting him, my life suddenly changed, that I made a complete transformation from a caterpillar into a butterfly. I didn't. Roza was able to convince my aunt to let me stay a little longer, making her a deal that I could stay home another month as a trial. Whenever I wanted to cut or burn myself, I called Zoltan instead, listening to his caramel voice over the telephone line was enough to remind me that I wasn't alone.
Zoltan made pictures of my entire family, the way I remembered them in life. Aunt Leah framed them, hanging them around the room, an epithet to the dead. Looking at the pictures, you could imagine for a moment that they weren't, that they were simply stuck in a moment of joy. At least they had someone to remember them. So many others were gone, turned to ashes without a single trace or even someone to whisper a prayer for them. Their lives burned out like a shooting star, gone before it had even left a mark.
Aunt Leah gradually came out of her shell, talking to me more and more about her family, using me as her last living link. Isabelle even joined in the conversations as my English improved, asking me about her grandparents, how our Nagymama's lips curled when she was angry or how Nagyapa gave a toothless smile of approval when he let us children eat cookies before dinner. They were grandparents she would never have.
Although my elusive uncle came back occasionally, he never moved in for good. He kept his base camp in Los Angeles. Two summers after I arrived in San Francisco, the summer I turned 13, Aunt Leah let Isabelle take me down to visit him. We spent a week searching for movie stars and visiting all of the places I'd only dreamt about when I was a little girl in Hungary. I went hours without thinking about Auschwitz, only wishing Hajna was there to look at Judy Garland's tiny feet on the Walk of Fame.
In Aunt Leah's improvement, Isabelle finally went off to school. Her teacher, Mrs. Booth had sent in her applications that first year. Unable to pay for her living expenses, my aunt discussed things with Mrs. Booth and they agreed that Isabelle could apply again in a couple of years. She scraped money together by taking a year off after high school and working as a waitress, deciding to keep the job once school began, alleviating some of the financial burden on my aunt. I was proud of her, proud for not letting the ghosts of Auschwitz that lived in our home hold her back from her dreams. She became my role model, the one I aspired to be.
A year after I met Zoltan, in 1948, the
Surviving Remnant
or
She'arit Hapleta
was published. It was a list of every survivor who had been able to inscribe their name in it. There were many David and Mrs. David Sterns listed, my stomach jumping at each one. Slowly, we crossed off each one as Aunt Leah called or wrote to them. None of them were the ones I was looking for and they all wanted information on their loved ones as well. My name appeared in the S section in black and white, my Aunt's number next to it. For three years, my heart skipped almost three beats every time the phone rang. One day, I realized it was foolish and stopped jumping at the familiar sound of the ring. It was never Father, never Mother, never Lujza.
No matter what I did, Auschwitz followed me like a hungry dog. Days and nights grew tolerable, but Auschwitz was always lapping at my heels. There were always twins in my nightmares, train whistles as I walked to school, men in white coats when I had a toothache. It didn't take much to take me back, to the place of eternal suffering and torment. To the place where the world left us, abandoned us to die. And the world would continue shutting its ears to our struggles for years to come.
My whole life, I grew feeling as though I was running, always unimportant, always trying to keep the flames of my sorrow to an ember.
No one heard us. They decided not to, to turn their heads away. It was too much to bear. Too much to know. Too hard to swallow.
But now that the world knows, now that the world has heard, it all seems so simple, so easy to defray.
I screamed and no one heard.
Next time, will you be listening?
Aliz’s story will continue. Look for the sequel to
Unravelled
in 2016.
Historical Notes:
Although this story is a work of fiction, it is heavily based on fact. Not many of “Mengele’s children” have spoken out publicly about their experiences, making it a part of the Holocaust rarely discussed. In 1995, Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of the experiments, created a group called CANDLES in order for the surviving twins to meet and share experiences. It is an acronym for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors. CANDLES, which is based in Terre Haute, Indiana, also serves as a Holocaust education center for the local community.
Not much is known about the procedures done on the twins, and many survivors have reported health problems well into their advanced age. However, it is known that Mengele experimented on twins (typically children, but not always), selected women, dwarves and others with obvious genetic variants in order to help the German population grow much more quickly. Sometimes, he would also experiment on Polish non-Jewish children or Jewish children with particularly “Aryan features.” In order to achieve a surge in the post-war German population, he reasoned, it would make sense to learn how to replicate the genetic pattern of twins so that in the future, German women could give birth to sets of multiples. Most of the records have been destroyed and many survivors have been unable to get ahold of their records to see what was actually done to them. In 2014, I had the honor of speaking to a non-Jewish woman who was experimented on. Originally from Belarus, she was three years old at the time of her incarceration in Auschwitz, so her memories from that time are understandably spotty. Because she was so young, she is unsure why she was selected for experimentation, but she was able to find a partial medical record for her time at Auschwitz. This record indicated that much of the daily blood draws were used to send to German soldiers on the front.
While most of the experiments discussed in this book focused on genetics, there were also many others that seemed to serve no purpose but to torture the victim. Although many of the stories have not been “historically corroborated,” many survivors discuss seeing firsthand or hearing of stories of twins sewn together, having organs removed without anesthetic and timing how long it took the person to die and boys being castrated. The human experiments discussed in this book are not to be confused by those at other camps, which focused on aiding soldiers on the front (i.e. wound recovery, how long a person can survive drinking only salt water, the effect of low air pressure on the brain, etc.), however they are equally barbaric.
Josef Mengele himself was in his mid-30s during his time at the camp. He is often described as very handsome and always wearing a spotless uniform and polished boots. Survivors report that he was incredibly charismatic and victims felt immediately safe with him. He delighted in coming to visit the children he experimented on in their barracks, some of whom called him “Uncle.” Having received two doctorates from the University of Munich (medicine and anthropology), Mengele was assigned to Auschwitz in 1943 where he worked both “selecting” (deciding which prisoners off of a transport would live and which would perish) and in his laboratory. He escaped Auschwitz in 1945, just before the Red Army came to liberate the camp. In 1949, he made his way to South America (Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil) where he lived out the remainder of his life. He died in 1979 when he apparently had a heart attack whilst swimming and completely eluded justice. He was buried under a false name.
It is estimated that 3000 twin children were experimented on in Auschwitz, or 1500 pairs of twins. Around 200 such children were found alive in Auschwitz upon liberation. Most of the survivors were Hungarian or from parts of Romania under Hungarian control, as Hungary was one of the last countries to surrender its Jews. Some of the older children went on the so-called death marches with the rest of the prisoners to other concentration camps in Germany. There, they either perished due to harsh conditions or were liberated in the spring of 1945.
There are not many books on the subject, however you can do some further reading with the following:
Surviving the Angel of Death: The True Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz
by Eva Mozes Kor and Lisa Rojany Buccieri
This is one of the very few testimonies in English from a surviving twin at Auschwitz. Eva Mozes Kor tells the story of the time she spent in Auschwitz as a human guinea pig with her identical twin sister, Miriam.
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account
by Miklos Nyiszli
Nyiszli’s book is essentially a journal of his time in the camp. In a highly privileged position, he worked as Mengele’s assistant. Before the war, he was a Jewish doctor from Hungary.
Children of the Flames: Dr. Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz
by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel
A compilation of stories of surviving twins. However, this book has more of a focus on Mengele and his escape.
In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe: A Dwarf Family’s Survival of the Holocaust
by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev
A narrative of the Ovitz family and their experience during the Holocaust. Seven of ten of them were dwarves and because of this, they were experimented on by Mengele. Miraculously, most of the family survived.
Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Story
by Lucie Adelsberger
This memoir tells the story of a doctor who was forced to practice her profession under Mengele’s watch, specially working with women.
Academic Non-Narrative Books:
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
by Robert Jay Lifton
Mengele: The Complete Story
by Gerald L. Posner and John Ware
Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans
by Vivien Spitz (this book focuses mostly on other doctors besides Mengele)
FILMS
Out of the Ashes (2003)
A made for TV film that focuses on Gisella Perl, a gynecologist who was forced to work under Dr. Mengele. It also chronicles her life after Auschwitz. It is based on her out-of-print book,
I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz.
Forgiving Dr. Mengele (2006)
Documentary about Eva Mozes Kor and her journey to forgive Dr. Mengele. The film features interviews with other twins who survived as well as a former Nazi doctor who stood trial and was exonerated.