Children of the Flames
by
Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel

Penguin USA

ISBN: 0140169318

Paperback Reprint edition (May 1992) Preface.

CANDLES IN THE NIGHT.

In the winter of 1984, I was asked by Parade magazine to seek out the
longlost child survivors of Dr.  Josef Mengele's experiments at
Auschwitz during World War II.  Of the estimated three thousand
twins-most of them young children-who had passed through Mengele's
laboratories between 1943 and 1944, only about a hundred were known to
have survived.  Many fewer were thought to be still alive when I
undertook my search for them in America and Israel.

I was aided in this effort by Eva and Miriam Mores, twin sisters who
had undergone painful experiments at Mengele's hands.  Eva, an American
housewife living in Terre Haute, Indiana, had long believed the twins'
ordeal, which had received no more than a passing reference in the
history of the Holocaust, should be told.  Determined to reunite all
the surviving twins, Eva and her sister had just founded an
international society of Auschwitz twins-CANDLES-an acronym for
Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Laboratory Experiments Survivors.

Through this group, the twins hoped to piece together what had been
done to them in Mengele's laboratory.  For unlike other death-camp
survivors, these child victims had kept totally silent about their
past.  Ridden with guilt and with shame, most had never breathed a word
about their ordeal as guinea pigs of the notorious Dr.  Mengele, not
even to loved ones.  Theirs was the untold story of the Holocaust.

A few well-placed ads in Israeli newspapers yielded gratifying
results.

Within days, dozens of twin survivors (most of whom had ended up in
Israel after the war) came forward to join CANDLES.  In tearful
reunions, they reforged the bond that had helped them survive both the
death camp and Mengele's demonic experiments.  All were united in their
fierce desire to see the war criminal brought to justice.

I arrived in Israel in March to begin my interviews with Mengele's
twins.

Although, thanks to CANDLES' burgeoning membership rolls, tracking down
their names and addresses was relatively simple, arranging actual
meetings with them was considerably more difficult.  Only at the gentle
prodding of Miriam and Eva did a number of twins agree to see me.  Each
session began with the whispered confession,

"I have never spoken of this to anyone."

But for many of the twins, simply telling what happened to them proved
to be a release.  Middle-aged, they spoke with the candor, intensity,
and strange eloquence of the very young.  In talking with me, many even
reverted to the mannerisms of childhood-losing their adult composure as
they related searing memories of camp life.  One woman, recalling the
rats scurrying across her toes at night as she tried to sleep in the
hard wooden stall that was her bed, shook and shivered like a little
girl.  A male twin winced and whimpered like a child while telling of a
painful injection Mengele had given him.  But then his face lit up with
a boyish grin as he described the delicious candy the doctor offered
him moments after.  They seemed in many ways to still be the frightened
eight- or ten-year-olds of yesteryear, listening for the sound of Dr.
Mengele's footsteps, dreading the arrival of the trucks that would take
them to his laboratory.  They wept as the memories came flooding
back.

Profoundly moved by their stories, I often found myself crying with
them.

Only a handful of the twins were able to provide me with a complete
account of their lives from the period before the war through the years
after Auschwitz.  Instead, most seemed obsessed by one period or
another.  Some vividly remembered Mengele's experiments, volunteering
precise details on the blood tests, injections, X rays, and surgeries
they had undergone.  Others focused on the SS doctor himself-his visits
to their barracks, how he liked to sit and chat with them.  A few of
the twins insisted they had no memories of Auschwitz whatsoever.

Instead, they dwelt on the sadness of their postwar adult lives-their
emotional upheavals, physical breakdowns, and longings for the dead
parents they had hardly known.  The younger they were at Auschwitz and
the less they consciously remembered, the greater their turmoil as
adults: That was the rule.

Mengele's passion for selecting Jews for the gas chambers of Auschwitz
had earned him the title "the Angel of Death."  With a flick of the
wrist, he would consign thousands to die.  Among the few exceptions
were the young twins he plucked out from the selection lines for use in
his research.  As a genetic scientist, Mengele hoped to produce a
master race of blond, blue-eyed Aryans.

Twins were the key.  What better way to test out theories on heredity
than by experimenting on heredity's perfect genetic specimens:
identical twins.

Most of the twins began their descent into Auschwitz by witnessing
their entire families being led away from them to be killed.  In their
special barracks, located just yards away from the crematoriums, they
observed the Nazis' extermination of the Jews at close range.  Twins as
young as five and six years of age endured torture, daily blood tests,
and starvation diets, as well as facing exposure to epidemics of
cholera, tuberculosis, and other deadly diseases that were rampant
because of unsanitary conditions.  Worst of all, of course, were
Mengele's barbaric pseudoscientific experiments.  But horrific as their
lives were, the twins enjoyed a special privileged status, for they
were regarded as

"Mengele's children."  And as such, they were spared the random
selections and march to the gas chambers that threatened every other
Auschwitz inmate.

Despite their ordeal, many of them clung to their childlike faith in
life.

During Mengele's mandated "recreation periods," male twins played
soccer under a sky made brighter by the flames pouring out of the
crematoriums.

Little girls were taken to fields on the outskirts of the camp, where
they picked bunches of wildflowers.

Some of the children even grew to like Mengele, substituting him for
the father they had lost.  "Uncle Mengele," as they called him,
delighted them with candy, joked with them, hugged and kissed them.

Some were persuaded that at the bottom of his evil heart was a soul
spot-an untapped core of goodness-reserved especially for his twins.

"I believe Josef Mengele loved little children," Vera Blau, a twin from
Tel Aviv, insisted to me during our first interview.  "Yes!  Even
though he was a murderer and a killer."

In writing this book, Mengele's special relationship with children
emerged as the most puzzling-and fascinating-aspect of this "angel" of
death.  Monstrous as he was, Mengele still managed throughout his life
to charm and beguile youngsters.  The bizarre, mysterious bond forged
between Mengele and "his" twins at Auschwitz remained long after they
had parted company.

However hard they tried, none could banish the memories of the handsome
young doctor who had tortured and- they thought, loved them.

I was not alone in being touched and inspired by the twins' stories of
their life under the abominable Dr.  Mengele.  My article

"The Twins of Auschwitz Today," which appeared on the cover of Parade
that September, was reprinted in newspapers in several countries, and
prompted an outpouring of response from readers around the world.
Thousands called for renewed efforts to hunt Dr.  Mengele.  In November
of 1984, former congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and Nazi-hunter Beale
Klarsfeld, both prominent in the battle to track down and prosecute
Nazi war criminals, invited me to accompany their delegation to
Paraguay as an observer in the search for Mengele.

The four-member delegation, which included Bishop Rene Valero of the
Brooklyn Catholic Diocese and Menachem Rosensalt, the child of
Holocaust survivors, confronted the regime of General Alfredo
Stroessner for information on the war criminal.  Stroessner had once
granted Mengele Paraguayan citizenship, and he was long believed to be
sheltering the SS doctor.  If Holtzman's mission failed to pressure the
old dictator, it did for the first time awaken the United States
government's interest in locating Josef Mengele.

CANDLES' dramatic weeklong pilgrimage to Auschwitz in January 1985, the
twins' march across the desolate Birkenau camp a few miles away, and
their emotional televised prayers at the long-standing crematorium,
attracted worldwide attention.  Partly as a result of their moving
appeals, three separate countries decided to reopen their Mengele
files.  By the spring of 1985, Israel, West Germany, and the United
States officially joined forces in a full-fledged hunt for the greatest
killer of the Holocaust known to be still at large.  A network of
intelligence agencies, from the CIA and the Israeli Mossad to Interpol,
agreed to cooperate to find the notorious Nazi doctor.

Mengele's children had effectively spurred the largest and most
ambitious hunt ever for a war criminal.  The twins quietly rejoiced at
this excess of international attention, after so many years of
indifference to the disappearance of their nemesis.  Their experiences
at the camp had made each one of them a philosopher-cynical at the ways
of the world, yet strangely hopeful.

On a return trip to Israel in April 1988, I reminisced with the twins
over the extraordinary events of the last four years.  I found them
media-savvy and, in stark contrast to our earlier meetings, quite
comfortable with discussing their Auschwitz experience.  Several were
now lecturing around the country, and one twin, Vera Kriegel, was even
flying regularly to West Germany to address audiences there about the
Holocaust.  Like small candles in the night, the twins were shedding
light over a period of history still shrouded in strange and terrifying
mystery.

My reunion with the twins also served as an affirmation of my own
unique bond with them.  I had been the first journalist ever to search
out and systematically interview them, to help make their stories known
to the world.

I had rejoiced at their media triumphs and cheered their successful
efforts to belatedly obtain reparations from the West German
government.  I felt as shocked and disappointed as they did when a body
alleged to be Mengele's was discovered in Brazil in June 1985, and the
global hunt was called off None of the twins believes the skeleton
found in a lonely gravesite in Embu is that of Dr.  Mengele.  The
weight of public opinion-and scientific testimony-has not been
sufficient to convince them he is really dead.  Supremely distrustful
of scientists, they point to the fact that not one of the legions of
forensic pathologists who examined the remains ever declared with 100
percent certainty the body was Mengele's.  Since the Israeli government
has consistently refused to close the case, since both Israel and West
Germany continue to offer rewards for his capture, they are hopeful the
real Josef Mengele will yet be found.

For them, he is still alive.  They can see him standing there in his
impeccable uniform, smiling, insisting he will never hurt them.  How he
loves to linger and play games!  He enjoys seeing them dressed in the
beautiful clothes he himself brings to their barracks-white pantaloons
for the boys, silk dresses for the girls.

But they also cannot forget the terror of his laboratory, the blood
tests, the injections, the experiments, the murderous operations.

Mengele's twins are now inching into old age.  Most are married, with
children and grandchildren of their own.  But despite the presence of
spouses, friends, and neighbors, they have periods of despair, when the
present seems far less real than the past.  When no one is looking,
they pull out faded letters and old photographs.  With trembling hands,
they peer at pictures of dead parents and siblings, or of themselves
before the horror.  These are the times they realize they will never
escape the shadow of the Angel of Death.  While going about their daily
chores, they may catch a glimpse of his face with its cynical
half-smile, the sadistic glint in his eye.  They see the legions of
skeletal men and women being carted away to their deaths.  And then
they remember the other children, their arms and legs flecked with
bruises from Mengele's needles: the twins who, unlike themselves, did
not survive.

Many of the twins suffer from a recurrent nightmare that they are back
at Auschwitz.  In their dreams, angry dogs bark while tall men in
uniforms relentlessly pursue them across dark, ominous terrains.  And
when these looming figures catch up with them, as they invariably do,
Mengele's twins cry in their sleep, as they surely cried as children so
many years ago.

Their nights are also filled with the ghosts of their loved ones.

Again and again, they relive the moment their parents, brothers, and
sisters were herded into the gas chambers.  They hear their family's
resigned footsteps trudging into the stark rooms disguised as showers
and imagine their surprise and terror when gas gushes out instead of
water.

Hedvah and Leah Stern find that as they grow older, they think about
their mother even more than before.  They can clearly see the lovely
young woman in a black print dress, waving good-bye as she promises
they will be reunited.  In the stillness of an Israeli night, Hedvah
and Leah hear their mother shouting to them,

"Wait, children, wait-wait for me at the gate."

Her anguished cries have carried over the busy, eventful years, like an
echo reverberating louder and louder over a deepening abyss.

For most, the passage of time has failed to bring peace of mind.

Nearly half a century later, they feel guilty at having been born
twins.  after all, despite all they suffered as Mengele's guinea pigs,
they still enjoyed the privileged status he bestowed upon them.

Mengele's twins are condemned to live with a terrible double-edged
sword: the hell they endured because of Mengele, and the life they owe
him as "his" children.

"Why were we spared?"  Mengele's twins ask themselves today.  "Why were
we the only ones in our family to survive?"  The more fortunate ones
turn to their lone surviving sibling for comfort and answers, only to
find the same sense of bewilderment and despair.

The sights of the camp-the dead bodies, the bones, the crematoriums
spewing bright red flames into the ver million skies-have continued to
haunt Mengele's twins.  They emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust
dazed, anxious to leave the past behind them, but they have learned the
past will never leave them.  And although they last saw Josef Mengele
in the winter of 1944, he has remained an ever-present force in each of
their lives.  This is his story-and theirs.  LUCE MA TALoN LAGNADO I
came to the story of Mengele's children through my late husband, and
although I am an American, his story became mine.  I met Alex Shlomo
Dekel while living in Israel in January 1962, and we were married one
year later.  My American upbringing had intrigued him; his European
past had fascinated me: the gallant widowed mother, who had raised him
and his brother before they were transported to Auschwitz in the first
convoy from his native Hungary; his experiences in the concentration
camp as a Mengele guinea pig; and his liberation from Birkenau by
American GIs, who saved his life at the time by intravenous feedings.

Alex was not a twin, but He had been spared an almost certain death
because of his Aryan good looks and his German-language fluency.  Not
long after we started seeing each other, he began to tell me his
story.

Especially haunting, I thought, was his final memory of his mother,
whom he had spotted despite her shaved head in an adjacent yard behind
a barbed-wire fence.  As one of Mengele's "privileged" children, he
knew he had more rations than she, and so he saved up all his food for
the day to give to her.

She refused to take it from her child, so he threw it over the fence,
where she was forced to retrieve it.  Later he told me that he had
survived by dreaming at night of consuming huge meals, and that this
had given him the strength to face the starvation of the next day.

Nourished on dreams!

That he had been a child prisoner of Auschwitz I understood.  That it
would color his entire life I did not.  But after we were married, I
discovered and gradually came to share his all-consuming passion to
find Mengele and bring him to justice.  Auschwitz was never far beneath
the surface of his thoughts.  He would try to forget, but from time to
time it would emerge, in episodes of unexplained rage and in periods of
deep depressions that I now understand are scorched into the Auschwitz
legacy of all the survivors.

Israel became his raison d'etre.  I told him it was his revenge.  His
life was often in danger, starting with his swimming ashore illegally
from Cyprus where his ship had been detained by the British, through
his dare-devil exploits, first in the Haganah and, later, in the
service of the Israeli government (some of which still cannot be
revealed).  His entire life was shaped by forces outside of himself.

Like so many others, Israel became his lost family.  I sensed he was
sometimes more at home in the memories of Auschwitz than in the real
world.  For the survivor, all is always Auschwitz.

As an archivist attached to the Israeli consulate in New York, Alex
began to collect information on Mengele's every move.  At first, I
didn't pay much attention to the pieces of information he shared with
me on the death-camp doctor's whereabouts.  Given enough time, I was
sure I could make him forget.  after all, we were living in America
now.  We had each other.  But being married to him was like being
married to a secret agent.  There were always secrets.  His wasn't
exactly the kind of work a wife could innocently ask about at the end
of the day.  "What did you do today, dear?"  I tried that only once!

His compulsive search for Mengele gradually escalated into a
full-scale, one-man hunt.  He began to contact anyone who had ever
heard of Mengele and might have knowledge of him.  I remember being
awakened one night by a telephone call at 3:00 A.M. from South America:
Someone had phoned to report a sighting.  There were many such calls.

The papers Alex accumulated began to take on the dimensions of a
personal library.  Every newspaper clipping and magazine article,
anything related to Mengele's whereabouts, helped Alex put pieces of
evidence together in the manner He had learned during his twenty-five
years as an intelligence officer for the Israeli government.  Alex soon
pinpointed Mengele's various residences and many of his movements in
and out of South America.  He even located a wholesale pharmacist
supplying drugs to Brazil-and concocted a wild scheme to take Mengele's
medicine to him (which I vetoed as being far too dangerous).  Anyone
who had even the remotest connection with Mengele or with South America
was a welcome visitor in our home.

In 1976, Alex contacted the editors of Time and convinced them of the
critical need to locate Mengele.  They financed his research as he
pursued the trail all over Europe, uncovering important new facts.

From Vienna, where he conferred with Simon Wiesenthal, he went to
Poland, where he persuaded the government to open its files on
Auschwitz and Mengele's experiments there.  Elated, he brought the
evidence home, where I slept innocently with Josef Mengele's
fingerprints and SS files under our bed.

Time published these findings in September 1977, and soon after, Alex
began to set down his experiences for a memoir that he hoped would
someday help arouse the world's conscience and lead to Mengele's
arrest.  In the meantime, he initiated another Mengele story with Life
magazine and spent hours with Dr.  Robert Lilton, giving oral testimony
for Dr.  Lilton's book on the Nazi doctors.  And although at the
beginning I had little patience with Alex's hunt to find Mengele, I
could no longer ignore the major theme of his life.

"Live now," I had urged him.  "Remove that tattooed reminder from your
arm," I begged.  "Remove my arm," was Alex's response.  Would I have
married him if I had known how his life would be consumed by this
obsession?

Yes, I know I would have.

That fateful summer of 1983, we were planning to go to Israel, where a
high-ranking intelligence contact had promised Alex access to Israel's
file on Mengele.  Before that, the man arrived in New York in June, and
when Alex returned home after meeting his plane, I noticed he was
distracted, talking of many things but not about Mengele.  Nor was he
feeling well.  He brushed aside my pleadings to go to the hospital when
he complained of pain in his left arm.  His lack of concern for his own
well-being was irresponsible but typical.  He always felt immune from
the ravages of time and fate-after Auschwitz, what else could happen to
him?

When Alex died suddenly after suffering a massive stroke and heart
attack, I realized retrospectively what his contact must have told him
that night; what the Israeli government already knew: Josef Mengele was
dead.  I could not help but feel that the hunted had finally caught up
with the hunter.  This knowledge surely must have broken Alex's heart,
dissolved his resolve to live.

after Alex's death, I resolved to carry on his mission.  I met Lucette
Lagnado, whose own interest in Mengele and his child victims paralleled
Alex's.  Many events took place in the course of writing this book,
including the discovery of Mengele's remains on June 21, 1985-two years
to the day after Alex's funeral.  Their destinies would remain
inextricably intertwined in death as they had been in life.

"I am sad and heartbroken," Elie Wiesel had telegraphed me from
Washington when He heard of Alex's passing.  "He was one of our most
devoted companions.  Few have endured his agony.  Few have lived with
it as deeply.

For myself and all the members of the United States Holocaust Council,
we shall always remember him."  As I sorted through Alex's papers to
gather material for this book, I came across this fragment repeated
throughout his notes: Tell your children of it, And let your children
tell their children, And their children another generation.

-Joel 1:3 It is this spirit that has guided me in completing his
work.

-SHEILA CoHN DEKEL New York City TwINS FATHER: Born 1915 in Budapest,
Hungary.  Real name: Zyl Spiegel.  Family moved to Munkaks,
Czechoslovakia.  Was twenty nine years old when he and twin sister,
Magda, were deported to Auschwitz.  Assigned by Dr.  Mengele to be in
charge of the twin boys.  The children called him

"Zvilingefater" or "Twins' Father."

MAGDA SPIEGEL: Twin sister of Zyl Spiegel.  Married with a
seven-year-old son when deported to death camp.  Worked as Mengele's
cleaning woman.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: Identical twins.  Born in Hungary in 1931.  Age
thirteen and a half when sent to Auschwitz with their mother.  The
Stern sisters, as they became known in the camp, are virtually
indistinguishable from one another.  They speak in one voice, agree
completely with what the other says, feel what the other feels, think
as the other thinks.

MOSHE OFFER: Born 1932 in small town in Hungary (now a part of Soviet
Union).  Deported to Auschwitz at age twelve, along with his twin
brother, Tibi, parents, and five brothers.  Entire family, except for
twins, sent immediately to the gas chambers.

zvl THE SAILOR: Born Zyl Klein in Galicia.  Not quite thirteen years
old when he and identical twin brother, Ladislav, were deported to
Auschwitz, along with extended family.  All but the twins perished.

Brothers estranged since the war.

EVA MOZES: American founder of CANDLES, the international organiZation
of Mengele twins.  Launched drive in 1984 to find and reunite all the
twins and publicize their story.  Born in Cluj, Romania, in 1935.

Deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944 along with her identical
twin sister, Miriam, her parents, and two older sisters.  Entire family
slaughtered except for twins.  Currently resides in Terre Haute,
Indiana.

MIRIAM MOZES: Twin sister of Eva, now living in Israel.  Cofounder and
organizer of CANDLES in Israel and Europe.  Works as head nurse in
Israeli hospital.  Suffers severe health problems believed due to
experiments undergone at the hands of Dr.  Mengele at Auschwitz.

JUDITRI YAGUDAH: Born May 25, 1934, in Braov, a small town in what used
to be Hungary, but is now part of Romania.  Nazis sent entire family to
ghetto in Cluj, and from there to Auschwitz.  Was ten years old when
she, identical twin sister, Ruthie, and parents were deported to
Auschwitz.  Father killed immediately by Nazis.

Judith and Ruthie sent with their mother to twins' barracks.

OLGA GROSSMAN: Born in 1938 in Czechoslovakia.  Was six years old when
deported to Auschwitz with her twin sister, Vera.  Family spent time in
other concentration camps before Auschwitz.  Has absolutely no memories
of her stay in the camp, and is unable to talk about the war.  Suffers
from recurrent hallucinations about Mengele.  Frequently
institutionalized as an adult.

VERA GROSSMAN: Olga's fraternal twin sister.  Was so different in
appearance from her sister that Mengele did not believe they were
really twins.  Unlike twin, claims to have very vivid memories of
Auschwitz.  Has no difficulty discussing the war.  Outgoing.  Active in
CANDLES and other Holocaust groups.  Travels to Germany to lecture
about the twins of Auschwitz.  Served as author's interpreter for all
Hebrew-language interviews of Israeli twins.

ALEX DEPEL: Born in Cluj, Romania, in 1930.  Age thirteen at time of
deportation to Auschwitz.  Though not a twin, selected by Mengele to go
to the twins' barracks because of his striking

"Aryan features.

Subjected to medical experiments like the twins.

PETER SOMOGYL: Born in Pecs, Hungary, in 1930.  Deported to Auschwitz
in the summer of 1944 on one of the last transports of Hungarian
Jews.

Mother and sister perished in the gas chambers.

Only Peter and twin brother survived.  Extremely popular with Dr.
Mengele-he nicknamed them "the intelligentsia" because of their fluency
in several languages, their knowledge of classical music, and their
ability to play the piano.

VERA BLAU: Was eleven years old when deported to Auschwitz in April
1944 from Czechoslovakia.  Arrived with twin sister, Rachel, mother,
and little brother.  Only twins survived.  Vera, an artist in Tel Aviv,
insists Mengele "loved" little children.

MENASHE L0R1NCZ1: Born in small town in Romania in 1934.

Shortly after Menashe and twin sister, Lea, celebrated their tenth
birthday in the Cluj Ghetto, they and their grandparents were rounded
up and deported to Auschwitz.  Grandparents immediately killed.  Fate
of mother unknown.  Became a messenger boy for Mengele.  One of the few
child inmates permitted to wander freely around the death camp.

LEA LORINCZI: Twin sister of Menashe.  Became an active Communist in
Romania after World War II.  Later emigrated to Israel, married
ultra-Orthodox man, and joined Hassidic sect.

Moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Now owns ladies' garment store on
Manhattan's Lower East Side.

EVA KUPAS: Deported to Auschwitz with twin brother in spring 1944.

Birth date unknown.  No recollection of prewar life.  Her only memory
of the death camp is the day she and other twin girls were taken to
pick wildflowers in a field just outside of Birkenau.

SOLOMON MALIK: Deported to Auschwitz in May 1944, at the age of
thirteen, along with parents, twin sister, and another pair of twin
brothers.  Only the four twins survived.

JOSEF MENGErE: Born March 16, 1911, in Gunzburg, Germany.

Son of wealthy factory owner.  Became a scientist with a special
interest in twins.  Volunteered to go to Auschwitz to work as a doctor
in the spring of 1943, at age thirty-two.  Disappeared after the war.

Also known as Helmut Gregor, G. Helmuth, Fritz Ulmann, Fritz Hollmann,
Jose Mengele, Peter Hochbicler, Ernst Sebastian Alvez, Jose Aspiazi,
Lars Ballstroem, Friedrich Edler von Breitenbach, Fritz Fischer, Karl
Geuske, Ludwig Gregor, Stanislaus Prosky, Fausto Rindon, Fausto Rondon,
Gregor Schl;lastro, Heinz Stobert, Dr.  Henrique Wollman, and

"Beppo.

I remember picking flowers at Auschwitz.  One day a warden took me and
a group of twin girls to a nearby field.  We picked all sorts of wild
flowers.  Then we walked around the camp holding bunches of flowers for
everyone to see.

And as we were walked through the camp, women prisoners started
shouting out names-this name, that name.

They were mothers, you see, and they were looking for their daughters
as we passed by.

I heard them cry out,

"Maybe my child is among them."

-EVA KUPAS, twin at Auschwitz A couple of years after the war, our
rabbi in Cluj decided to hold a memorial service for all the Jews from
our town who had died in the Holocaust.

The rabbi said that if anyone in the congregation had bars of soap left
over from the concentration camp, we should bring it to the temple.  He
told us it had to be "buried" because it had been made from human
flesh.

It was the first time I had heard that.  Before we left the camp, my
twin sister and I took whatever we could with us.  At a time when goods
were scarce, I used the soap all the time.

After the rabbi's address, I felt terrified.  I thought,

"Maybe I used soap made from my family."

For years, I had continuous nightmares.  Every night, I dreamt I was
washing myself with soap made from my parents or my sister.

-EVA MoZES, twin at Auschwitz Prologue.

THE JAZZ BAR.

ZYL THE SAILOR: All my life, I have tried to run away from Auschwitz.

I have sailed everywhere, from the North Sea to the Tropic of Cancer,
the Great Lakes of Michigan to Madagascar.

Montevideo, Johannesburg, Hollywood.

But wherever I went, thoughts of the death camp came back to haunt
me.

I try to forget.  I try to erase the memories.  But I can't seem to
leave Auschwitz behind, no matter how far I go.  I find reminders of
the camp all over the world.  Even right here in Israel.

From the window of my apartment house in Ashdod, I can see a factory-a
large industrial plant that manufactures I don't know what.

Textiles, I think.  It has a large chimney which spews out fire at
night.

And when I look out my window in the evening, I see not a factory
chimney, but the crematorium of Birkenau with its flames, its tall red
flames leaping out at the sky.

Last night was Lag b'Omer, the feast of the mystics.  The festival of
bonfires.  Once a year, we Jews are supposed to celebrate the end of
the mourning period for our lost sages.

All over Israel yesterday, the little children were celebrating by
building bonfires.  As I walked along the streets, I watched them
joyfully throwing bits and pieces of wood into the flames.  They
roasted potatoes, sang songs, danced around the fire.

Lag B'Omer is only once a year, but I am always seeing fire.  Day and
night.  All year long.

As I watched the children making their bonfires yesterday, I thought of
the fire made OF the children.  The fire without wood.  The fire of
Auschwitz-Birkenau.

For four months, forty years ago, I also saw fire day and night.  I
lived in barracks with a group of twins.  Twins!  Twins!  Dr.  Mengele
only wanted twins.

Our barracks were located just a few yards away from the crematorium.

We could see it from our window, from our door, wherever we turned we
saw fire.  Every day and every night those four months, we watched as
Mengele motioned people toward this crematorium.

We saw thousands of people going in each day.  And not one ever came
out.

We were so close to this crematorium that we became friends with the
Sonderkommandos, the young boys who worked inside the gas chambers.  A
few of them were from my hometown in Galicia.

They gave us detailed reports: "Today, we burned ten thousand Jews.

Yesterday, we disposed of eight thousand."

And every day, they warned us,

"You will be next.  Dr.  Mengele has decided you should be reunited
with your parents."  We believed them.

We were sure that tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow, Mengele would
send all the twins into the flames.

But even as we expected to die, we continued to obey Mengele.  He made
us write cheerful postcards: Everything is fine, we wrote to other
Jews.  We are working.

I see fire everywhere.  Although I am at sea, I am consumed by the
flames.

Yes, yes, there have been moments when I forgot.

I sailed to the United States a few years ago.  My boat docked in New
York City.  I had a few hours off First, I visited an aunt in
Brooklyn.

But I felt restless and uncomfortable.  She kept talking and talking,
and my mind was elsewhere.

In Auschwitz, I suppose.  I finally told her my ship was sailing, and
left her house.

I started walking around Manhattan.  I was wandering on the West Side,
along Eighth or Ninth Avenue, when I saw a large crowd of people
standing outside a bar.  They were pushing their way in, and I found
myself being pushed inside along with them.

Inside, it was dark and cool.  I could see musicians lined up on a
stage.  There were forty, fifty, of them and they were standing in a
single straight line.  And even though they had no leader, no
conductor, they managed to play in perfect harmony.

They were playing music that was not from this earth.

Among the musicians, I noticed

"Satchmo"-Louis Armstrong.  I recognized him instantly from
photographs.

I ordered a beer.  And another.  Then another, and another.  It was
very expensive; you had to leave a tip after each order.

At a table not far from me, there were these two young girls.  They sat
there, laughing and drinking.

Then, they got up and went over to another table where a couple of
young men were sitting, and started kissing them.  They embraced to the
rhythm of the jazz.

I was in that bar for an hour, the only white man there.  I spent sixty
dollars-more money than I've ever spent in one hour.

Before I even realized what was happening, the same crowd that had
pushed itself in, that had pushed me in, got up and left.  I was pulled
outside with them.

I found myself back on the street.  I started walking, and somehow,
even though I was quite tipsy, I made it back to my ship.

I have been to New York many, many times since then, and always I have
searched for that jazz bar.  But I have never been able to find even a
trace of it.

I can still remember the music, the atmosphere, the beer, the girls
kissing the boys to the beat of Louis Armstrong.

Yes, I was happy then!  In fact, never in my life have I been as happy
as during the hour I spent inside that dive on the West Side.

Because for one whole hour, I actually managed to forget Auschwitz, and
Dr.  Josef Mengele.  . .

one.

MENGELE AND HIS CHILDREN.

Nine-year-old Beppo Mengele stood at the Gunzburg railroad station,
awaiting the train that would bring in supplies for his father's
factory.

How excited he became when it pulled into the station!  The townspeople
recall how, in a loud voice, he would order his two brothers to get
ready to unload.  Young Mengele was always happy when the transports
arrived.

Karl and Walburga Mengele often assigned their oldest boy the task of
overseeing the shipment of goods to and from the Mengele farm-equipment
factory.  Beppo would ride the horse-drawn wagon down to the train
station, delighting at the ruckus it caused as it clattered across the
cobbled stone streets of the sleepy little town.  If it was early in
the morning, the residents of Augsburgstrasse, Gunzburg's main street,
were awakened by the noise of the heavy steel parts banging and
clanging against one another.  They would sigh and mutter
affectionately,

"Mengele is coming."  With his dark hair, gleaming eyes, and
mischievous grin, Beppo was an endearing child-the most popular of the
three Mengele brothers.

At the station, the little boy proved that he deserved the trust his
parents placed in him.  He watched carefully as the shipments were
stacked onto the trains.  If a train had brought in supplies, he
supervised their loading intO the carriage, making certain nothing was
broken or left behind.

It was a grown-up job, and young Mengele was said to revel in it.

A quarter of a century later, an older Beppo-SS Dr.  Josef Mengele
-still delighted at the arrival of trains and their cargoes, but at a
different railway stop.

Mo SHE OFFER: I was born in 1932 in a small town in what is now a part
of Russia.

My twin brother and I were the youngest of four brothers.  We were
nicknamed

"Miki and Tibi."

My family was very wealthy.  Father owned a large estate with two
plants that manufactured liquor.  We grew potatoes and fruit on our
farm, and made sweet liqueurs from them.

It was a wonderful life.  Each morning, Tibi and I were taken to school
by a horse-drawn carriage.  We owned two horses!

Then the Germans came in 1944.  They took everything from us.

They confiscated our gold, our jewelry, our furniture-all our
possessions.  We were no longer permitted to live on the farm.

Instead, we were ordered to take two suitcases and report to the
village synagogue, where we were jammed along with all the other Jews
in our town.

From there, we were moved to a ghetto in a big city.  The conditions
were terrible.  We had no clothes.  We were forced to wear-literally
the shirt on our back.  We weren't given food, either, and we were
constantly hungry.  Dead people littered the streets; they had starved
to death.

One day, the Germans returned.  We were taken out of the ghetto and
placed in cattle cars.  The journey took eight days-eight days without
water, without food.  It is painful for me to remember what went on
there.  It is too horrible to describe.

We arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944.  I can even tell you the exact
time: ten o'clock in the morning.

When they opened the doors to our cattle cars, there were a lot of dead
children.  During the trip, some mothers couldn't bear to hear the
cries of their hungry babies-and so they killed them.  I remember two
blond, very beautiful children in my car whose mother had choked them
to death because she could not stand to watch them suffer.

When we stepped off the trains, we could hear soldiers yelling,

"Men on one side, women on the other side."  Some German SS guards were
also shouting,

"We want twins-bring us the twins!"

Dr.  Mengele was making the selections.  He stood there, tall, nice
looking, and he was dressed very well, as if he wanted to make a good
impression.

He had very soft hands, and he made fast decisions.

I heard my father cry out to them he had twins.  He went over
personally to Dr.  Mengele, and told him,

"I have a pair of twin boys."

Mengele sent some SS guards over to us.  My twin, Tibi, and I were
ordered to leave our parents and brothers and follow them.

But we didn't want to be separated from our mother, and so the Nazis
separated us by force.  My father begged Mengele to give us some food
and water.  But Mengele motioned to an SS guard, who beat him up on the
spot.

As we were led away, I saw my father fall to the ground.

There is nothing in Josef Mengele's early life that would have prepared
him for the notoriety that was destined to engulf him.  As a youth, he
was charming and carefree and not especially studious.  No one who
remembers Mengele growing up in his picturesque Bavarian town ever saw
a hint of the pathology that would make him a killer, or a sign of the
obsessions that would make him a concentration-camp doctor.  There was
an innocence and a sweetness to young Josef that would lead Gunzburg's
citizens to shake their heads in disbelief when they heard, years
later, of his savage deeds at Auschwitz.  The fiendish death-camp
physician had nothing in common with the lovable youngster they all had
known.  The Nazi professor brutally experimenting on young twins could
hardly have been the same playful little scamp they affectionately
called "the Beppo," years after he had grown out of the childish
nickname.

Even as he grandly swept through the barracks at Auschwitz years later,
he was like a vision, this handsome, genteel German officer in his
impeccable SS uniform, shiny boots, and white gloves.  He looked less
like a Nazi official than a Hollywood version of one-Tyrone Power in
the role of SS captain.  Dr.  Josef Mengele would maintain this
beautiful facade throughout his tenure at Auschwitz.  None of the
bewildered new arrivals would discern the murderer, or even the sadist,
in the polite young SS doctor until it was too late.  Mengele would
decide who lived and who died with a smile and an airy wave of his
elegant white-gloved hand.  He would charm the women of
AuschwitzBirkenau even as he sent them to the gas chambers.  The
Gypsies would love him as one of their own to the very end.  But
Mengele would be at his best with the young twins he removed from the
selection line for use in his medical experiments.  With them, he
could be as warm and affectionate as he had been as a little boy
growing up in a small Bavarian farming town.  Did He see something of
his old self in these children, innocent and doomed?  For what better
symbol, after all, of Mengele's own dual nature-the angel and the
monster, the gentle young doctor and the sadistic killer-than a twin.

Josef Mengele was born on March 16, 1911, in Ginzburg, a medieval
village on the banks of the Danube.  Three years earlier, his mother,
Walburga, had given birth to a stillborn child.  Soon after, she
became pregnant again.  within sixteen months, Josef had a brother,
Karl Thaddeus.  In 1914, another son, Alois, was born.  Josef adored
"Lolo."  He felt much closer to him than to Karl Jr and, as they grew
up, always included him in all their games.

In the years before World War I, the Mengeles lived modestly, sharing
a house with another family.  While Walburga tended to the boys, Karl
Mengele spent most of his time expanding his new factory.

Karl was new to Gun:zburg.  He had left his own native village after
his older brother inherited the family farm, and studied to become an
engineer.  Settling in Gunzburg, he had married the strong, energetic
Walburga, four years his senior.

Walburga's parents, who were wealthy farmers, loaned their sonin-law
the money to start his new business.  Karl quickly proved he deserved
the investment by patenting a number of handy farming tools, which
enhanced his standing in his wife's hometown.  What precisely these
tools were has been lost in Gunzburg's history-but their inventor,
though long dead, still enjoys a reputation as a creative, industrious
man.

World War I was the turning point for the Mengeles' fortunes.

The family received lucrative contracts to manufacture military goods
and was busy turning out army vehicles and other weaponry.  At the end
of the war, once again in the farm-equipment business, the Mengele
plant was among the largest in Gunzburg.  By 1918, the Mengeles were
rich enough to move to a home of their own.  Karl and his wife picked a
lovely villa across the street from the Gymnasium the boys would
attend.

VERA GROSSMAN: I was born in Czechoslovakia in 1938 to a very wealthy
family.  My father, who was twenty years older than my mother, owned
many fields and plantations.  More than two hundred laborers worked for
him, tilling the soil and helping to pick and package the fruits and
vegetables.

He fell in love with my mother when she was just a young girl.

Before the war, Mother was extremely beautiful.  She had jet-black hair
and blue eyes.

When they married, he brought her to live on his estate and lavished
her with clothes, servants, jewels.  All her dresses were hand-made in
Prague.

Once, a dress she had ordered for a wedding didn't arrive on time.

My father sent his chauffeur all the way to Prague-hundreds of
kilometers away-to fetch it.

My father was delighted when Olga and I were born.  At his age, he
considered twins a double blessing.  We were spoiled and given
everything children could want.

Of course, this lifestyle came to an and when the Germans invaded
Czechoslovakia.  Jews could no longer live openly.  Even though my
father was very rich, and had connections with the government we still
had to go into hiding.  We had to abandon everything.

First, my father bribed a Christian family to let us live in their
attic.  It was a terrifying period.  I was only four years old, but I
remember how we were constantly admonished not to make any noise.  Even
to cry was forbidden, because it would endanger the family.

And to this day, I am haunted by this feeling-that if I do something
wrong, my whole family will die.

Eventually, it became so dangerous to hide Jews in Czechoslovakia that
no one wanted to shelter us-no matter what my father was willing to
pay.  We lived like animals, lying low during the day, foraging for
food at night.  I can recall eating raw potatoes, when that was all my
parents could find.

But eventually the Germans found us there.  We were sent to a series of
concentration camps, until we arrived finally at Auschwitz, in the
spring of 1944.

To outsiders, the Mengeles seemed a close, devoted family.  A devout
Catholic, Walburga raised her sons to be regular churchgoers.

Old family albums show Josef dressed as an altar boy, the picture of
innocence and piety.  Dressed in their Sunday best, father, mother, and
the three children went each week to the beautiful eighteenthcentury
church near the old marketplace.  They were a handsome family and, as
their wealth increased, the cause of some fascination in the town.

Neighbors recall how Josef, Karl Heinz, and Lolo shared friends, romped
about the fields, and went on frequent outings with their parents.  A
few older residents can still remember the skating parties Karl and
Walburga held for the children on a small pond near their house.  They
served delicious candied apples, while music from a wind-up gramophone
played in the frosty air.

The Mengele boys were always the object of much fawning, especially
Josef.  He was a docile child, and eager to please; Walburga had made
sure of that.  But though he acted like an angel, he looked more like a
young Gypsy.  In fact, some who knew him then had the distinct feeling
that at any moment this obedient little boy would make a run for it,
defying his parents as other normal children did.

Mengele never broke loose, however.  His early school records show he
was a model child, who impressed his teachers with his exceptionally
good behavior.  Though a mediocre student, he still managed to receive
A's in conduct and diligence throughout his elementary and high school
years.  Even in the strict Prussian atmosphere of a prewar Gymnasium,
teachers went out of their way to praise the perfect conduct of Beppo
Mengele.

ALEX DEKEL: I could hear the blaring music of Lohengrin being piped
through loudspeakers as I walked through the gates of Auschwitz It was
like entering the inferno.

I was thirteen years old when my mother and I were deported to the
death camp from our hometown of Cluj, in Transylvania.

In early March 1944, my mother had received word that we were being
sent to a work camp in central Hungary, supposedly to help with the war
effort.

We were afraid, but the hope of living, of going only to a labor camp,
kept us going.

The deportations were organized alphabetically, and since our last
initial was D we were the first to be called to board the train.

After two horrible days aboard this train, I knew we had gone far
beyond the borders of Hungary, and were destined either for Germany or
Poland.  Panic reigned in the cars.  Two people committed suicide.

My mother clutched me to her and covered my ears with her hands.

When the train finally stopped, the Germans ordered everyone to get
out.  I smelled a faint burning odor.  A sign along the tracks read

BIRKENAU.

Dr.  Mengele was standing at the head of the selection line.  He
noticed me immediately because I didn't look Jewish.  I had very blond
hair, and blue eyes, and I was in excellent physical shape.  When he
started talking to me, I answered him in fluent German.

Mengele wasn't only looking for twins-he wanted triplets, midgets,
hunchbacks, any unusual types.  Even people like me-Jews who looked
like perfect Aryans.  He asked me to step out of the line.  I looked
around for my mother, but she had disappeared.

I prayed that she was among a group of women who had been selected to
live.

Mengele's mother was the archetypal German hausfrau whose life revolved
around her children.  Photographs show a heavyset woman with a stern,
homely face and dark, scowling eyes.  Unlike her husband, who adopted
an aristocratic demeanor with his growing wealth, Walburga made no
attempt to alter her dowdy and matronly appearance.

In the fashion of older peasant women, she dressed almost entirely in
black.

"Wally" Mengele suffered from a terrible weight problem, which stemmed
from her lone indulgence: food.  She simply loved to eat.

One Gunzburg woman who knew her well, now relocated to New York's
affluent Westchester County, spins story after story about this
impassioned craving.  Mrs.  Mengele's favorite pastime, she recalls,
was the afternoon kaffee klatsch, the get-tog ethers with women friends
over coffee and pastry.  Over the years, Walburga grew enormous.  She
ate constantly, compulsively.  She became so obese, she could hardly
walk.

She was so massive, she looked almost pregnant.  She was so hungry she
devoured everything in sight.

There was a troubling, terrifying side to Mengele's mother that only a
few people saw, such as the workers at her husband's factory.

Dr.  Zdenek Zofka, the unofficial historian of Gunzburg, says the
employees fretted whenever Wally came to visit.  She had no
compunctions about yelling at them and embarrassing them before the
others, according to Zofka, and was inclined to fly into rages at the
slightest provocation.  They nicknamed her "the Matador," and
instinctively stayed out of her way.  Once, she screamed at some female
employees for not having washed the factory's curtains.  When they
argued it was not their job, she continued to scold and threaten them,
thereby earning their lifelong enmity.  Over forty years after her
death, old Mengele factory workers still harbor bitter feelings toward
the indomitable Walburga Mengele.

Mengele's mother was larger than life, and she loomed as a gigantic
figure in Josefs life-impossible to escape, equally impossible to
please.  She could be warm and maternal, or she could behave like a
raging bull.  Her reactions were impossible to predict.  In an
unpublished autobiography he wrote many years after the war, Mengele
recounted a day when his father came home with a wonderful surprise for
the family: a new automobile.  The three boys were overjoyed.  Karl
invited his wife to come out and join them for a ride.  But Walburga
was livid.  How dare he indulge in such a large purchase-such an
extravagance-without her approval?  Karl tried to soothe her, to no
avail, and finally exploded and threatened to leave her.  According to
his account, Josef listened, petrified, to his parents' quarrel.  After
his father had left the room, the little boy went over to comfort his
mother.

"I will always stay with you," he told her.

HEDVAH AND LFAH STERN: When they opened the door to our cattle car, our
mother became very frightened.  "Stay with me, children," she told us,
refusing to let go of our hands.

But then some prisoners told her in Yiddish,

"Tell them you have twins.

There is a Dr.  Mengele here who wants twins.  Only twins are being
kept alive."

But our mother didn't want to be separated from us.  She said,

"No, you are coming with me," and continued walking toward the
crematorium.

We were thirteen-and-a-half years old when our family was sent to
Auschwitz from our small town in Hungary.  There were a lot of Jews
living in that town before the war.

Our mother was a widow.  Father died when we were only six years old,
and mother never remarried.  She decided to raise us by herself because
she feared that a second husband might mistreat us.

We were very close to our mother.  She was a seamstress, and after our
father died, she had to work hard to support us.  Yet she never let us
feel like orphans.  She gave us whatever we wanted.  We lacked for
nothing.

We adored her.  We fought with each other to get her attention.  We
dreamt of the day we would be old enough to work and help her.

We hoped to open up our own seamstress shop.  Whatever we earned, we
planned to give it to our mother.  We wanted to call it

"The Stern Sisters."

At Auschwitz, mother was determined to hold on to us.  She hid us under
her skirt.

Josef was the one person who was able to pierce his mother's stern
facade and elicit a smile and a little warmth.  Mengele's writings
about his childhood suggest that from the start, he was his mother's
son, loyally siding with her, whatever the issue.  He seems to have
preferred his temperamental mother to his father, whose life revolved
around the factory.  Although Mengele patterned himself in dress and
demeanor after Karl, his love was reserved for Walburga.  Twice
married, he never lived with any woman for any length of time.  Also
twice separated, he had relationships marred by estrangements and
disaffection.  He could not form a deep attachment, even to the mother
of his child.

When he was fifteen years old, Mengele became ill with osteomylitis, a
disease of the bone marrow that was almost always fatal in those
days.

He also developed two ailments that were probably related to the
osteomylitis: nephritis, a painful inflammation of the kidneys, and a
severe systemic infection.  Because of his illness, he was out of
school between six and nine months.  His grades, never very good,
suffered a dramatic decline.  It was a struggle simply to keep up with
his classmates and not be left back.  He failed several subjects,
prompting one teacher to observe on his report card that Josef "must
become more diligent, more studious, and more ambitious."

Outside the confines of the dreary Gymnasium, Mengele fared much
better.  His social skills were far more impressive than his
intellectual prowess.  To his friends and schoolmates, young Josef was
charming and articulate-a natural leader.  The handsome, debonair Beppo
was in his element in Gunzburg's chic cale society and salons.

Mengele and his youngest brother, Lolo, ran with an elite, affluent
crowd of young men and girls who were pretty and flirtatious without
being loose.  Josef and his friends dressed impeccably, soon drove
their own cars, and never left home without the requisite hat and white
gloves.  They didn't actually wear the gloves, but only held them,
nonchalantly, in one hand.

It is ironic that years later, in his autobiography, Mengele conjured a
picture of himself as a solitary, self-effacing youth.  In his own
eyes, he was an exceptionally virtuous young man, serious and
committed, with few interests other than his studies and political
youth groups.

He depicted himself as monk like and ascetic, different from other
young men his age.

But Mengele's vision of his past was, in fact, an excellent description
of his lonely existence during the period he penned his manuscript,
when he was already in his sixties.  He was merely projecting what his
mother had wanted him to be-austere, chaste, self denying-whereas his
actual nature tended toward luxury and self-indulgence.  Like his
father, he preferred the finer things in life.

At balls, which were held throughout the year at the homes of his
wealthy friends, Beppo Mengele was one of the most sought-after dance
partners.  He was extremely handsome, with classic features and a
slight enigmatic smile.  Most striking were his eyes, which were wide
and thoughtful and varicolored.  Josef was certainly conscious of his
good looks, though he wished he were taller.  Like his father, he took
great pains to appear the picture of elegance.  His suits were always
of the most expensive fabrics, tailored in the most flattering cut.

Yet acquaintances remember he managed to seem as though he hardly spent
a moment on his appearance.  Young Mengele possessed a grace, mingled
with nonchalance, which the Italian Renaissance princes had dubbed
sprezzaturo-the art of going through life looking as if whatever you
did came effortlessly.

SOLOMON MALIK: Dr.  Mengele made an immediate impression.  He was very
handsome, very nicely dressed.

When my family arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944 from Romania, we heard
Mengele asking for twins.  There were two sets of twins in the
family-my sister and I and our two younger brothers.  But we didn't
want to admit we were all twins.  We did not know what was going to
happen.

Then, another family who knew us pointed us out to Mengele, telling
him,

"There are some twins!"  And so Mengele took the four of us away, along
with our mother.

EVA KUPAS: He was so nice-looking.  .

We arrived in Auschwitz in the spring of 1944.

My twin brother and I were marching with our mother toward the gas
chambers when she told us,

"Children-go to the Germans.  Run back to where they are taking the
twins."

Her instinct, I guess, told her we would be safer if we left her.

While our mother and little brother continued marching in the direction
of the crematorium, we ran back toward the selection lines.

There was Dr.  Mengele, standing at the head of the line.

My first impression of Mengele was that he was so nice-looking very
nice-looking.

Young Beppo's elite group of friends adopted a favorite hangout, the
fashionable Cafe Mader in the ceziter of town.  They spent most
Saturday nights there, whiling away the late hours, sipping coffee, and
chatting, thoroughly indifferent to the blandishments of a
rabble-rouser named Adolph Hitler whose influence was just beginning to
be felt in the late 1920s.  Mengele's crowd was completely uninvolved
with Gunzburg's burgeoning Nazi circle, caring much more about
expensive cars than politics.

But Mengele and many of his friends did become active in a group known
as the Grossdeutscher Jugendbund, or Greater Germany Youth Movement.

The young people's branch of the Stalhelm or

"Steel Helmets" party, it was an intensely nationalistic and patriotic
organization that urged its young members to strive for a return to the
Deutschland of old, the Volk-basic values of the earth and

"Mother Germany."  In some ways, the group resembled the
back-to-the-land groups such as the kibbutzim of Palestine.  The old
veterans of World War I who formed the original Steel Helmets recruited
many young people to perpetuate their goals.

Josef became a local leader, preparing papers and giving eloquent
speeches.

According to Zofka, the author of a doctoral dissertation on the
political allegiances of Gunzburg's population before the war, dozens
of young men, many of them sons of the town's elite, also gravitated
toward this movement.  The upper-middle-class German youth of that era
volunteered for the Grossdeutscher Jugendbund almost as reflexively as
their American counterparts were signing up for the Boy Scouts.

Mengele's strong allegiance to the Volk movement continued past his
adolescence.  He officially joined the Stalhelm in 1931, when he was a
first-year student at the University of Munich, and his brothers
followed suit.

Beyond the nationalistic ideals of the Stalhelm, however, young Josef
seemed to have had no other clear political allegiances, and certainly
none to Nazism.  His closest childhood friend, Hermann Lieb, insists
that Mengele was much more interested in dances, girls, and swimming
parties in the Danube than in the political movements of the day.

Deeply ambitious, Mengele desired to make a name for himself -not
simply to inherit his father's.  Although an indifferent student,
Mengele knew he wanted to escape a life in the farm-equipment
factory.

The family business held no long-term interest for him.  He would
strike out on his own, away from Gunzburg and the shadow of his
competent father and his domineering mother.  Though his grades were
uniformly poor, his goal was lofty-he would become a doctor and pursue
studies in anthropology and genetics.  With chilling prescience, he
told a friend at the Gymnasium,

"One day, my name will be in the encyclopedia."

Since bad grades were not a deterrent to entering German universities,
in the autumn of 1930 Mengele left Gunzburg to begin his studies at the
University of Munich.  The townspeople of Gunzburg were genuinely sorry
to see him go, as were the workers at his father's factory.  Of the
three Mengele sons, Beppo was their favorite.  He had been, as they
liked to put it, "the best of the Mengeles," the friendliest and the
most humane.

The university was worlds apart from what Mengele had known in
provincial Gunzburg and his stuff boyhood Gymnasium.  Munich was a
bustling, cosmopolitan city, filled with cultural outlets.  Mengele, a
longtime lover of opera and classical music, had his pick of concerts
to attend.  There were also elegant shops, fine restaurants, art
galleries, and the Pinakothek, one of the best museums in the world.

Mengele's freshman year, 1930, was also a time when Hitler was
beginning to find fertile ground for his most radical ideas.  With
millions unemployed due to the economic depression, vast crowds were
gathering at his rallies.  Mengele could not have been oblivious to the
speeches that were luring so many of his countrymen, filled as they
were with promises of a new Germany, cleansed of all elements that had
led to its decline, and so powerful it would conquer the world.

The centerpiece of Hitler's speeches was a call for "racial purity," an
idea that was to become the driving force of Mengele's existence.

The future dictator beguiled his audiences with his dream-a country
populated by blond, blue-eyed supermen and super women a vision that
would be achieved through a strict program of "racial hygiene."

Hitler called for the elimination of all "inferior" races, especially
the Jews.

As Hitler gathered strength, the traditional academic disciplines began
to mirror his obsession with race.  Even as Hitler and his supporters
pressed the need to stop the "contamination" of Germany with Jewish
blood, Munich university professors expounded similar notions in the
classrooms with great shows of profundity.  Subjects such as genetics,
biology, history, and anthropology were all being taught with a
markedly anti-Semitic slant.

Mengele's chosen fields of anthropology and genetics were especially
influenced by the racist theories of Nazi dogma.  While the Brownshirts
and storm troopers tried to realize Hitler's dream of a new Germany
through violence and terror in the streets, genetic scientists were
hard at work inside their laboratories, buttressing his theories on the
racial inferiority of Jews.

At the University of Munich, Mengele metamorphosed from a carefree bon
vivant into a serious student of ideas.  It was in Munich that Mengele
first exhibited the obsessive attention to work that would mark his
later years.  At twenty, Mengele displayed more ambition than ever
before, as the influence of his hard-driving father-and self denying
mother-increasingly revealed itself.  At the university, Mengele was
discovering an outlet for his burning need to succeed.  His university
records suggest that he worked very hard and carried a heavy course
load compared to his peers.  Friends from the period also recall how
diligent Mengele was.  Whenever they dropped in to see him at his
apartment, he would greet them with a book in hand.  Indeed, the ideas
Mengele was so anxiously absorbing in his studies were precisely the
ones that would propel him down the road to Auschwitz.  HIS
apprenticeship as a mass murderer formally began not on the selection
lines of the concentration camp but in the classrooms of the University
of Munich.

As his autobiographical writings indicate, Mengele was beguiled by the
notion of creating a superior race; it was the catalyst for his
decision to become a eugenic scientist, in addition to obtaining a
medical degree.  To improve his credentials as a racial doctor, he
sought a Ph.D. in anthropology, and wrote a lengthy dissertation.  The
possibility of molding a perfect breed of Aryan gods struck a
responsive chord in the boy from Bavaria with the aristocratic
pretensions.  The vanity and sense of superiority had always been
there, even in the genial Beppo of Gunzburg.  What the villagers and
the workers at his father's factory had seen as friendliness and
bonhomie were cut from the same cloth as the deceptively charming
demeanor Mengele would maintain throughout his life, right up to his
apotheosis as the

"Angel" of Death.

Early on in his studies, Mengele had been introduced to the work of the
social Darwinists, who nearly a half-century earlier, in Victorian
England, had argued that "biology is destiny."  The social Darwinists
had believed that nearly all personal and social problems were
inherited.  Alcoholism, insanity, even poverty and left-handedness,
were the result of bad genes.  The social Darwinists espoused a program
of active intervention to ensure that only the "best" people
survived.

They wanted to encourage the genetically fit to have more children,
while those of questionable stock would remain childless.

The theories of the social Darwinists evolved and gained credence, so
that by the 1920s several countries, including Germany and the United
States, were fostering a eugenics movement.  In Washington, for
instance, as Congress was considering new immigration laws, several
members advocated the need to limit entry of Eastern European refugees
on the grounds they would "contaminate American blood."

While arguing for passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, some lawmakers
maintained that Latin Americans, Slavs, and even the Irish were
"mentally and morally inferior to" There was an idealistic component to
the eugenics movement, which flourished in Germany long before
Hitler.

German scientists were not that diflerent from their American and
English counterparts in promoting their programs of "racial hygiene."

Eugenicists everywhere saw themselves as visionaries, idealists working
for a better world through the human gene.  They were to create a
Utopia, a world free of poverty, illness, and all other physical and
mental handicaps.  The Germans, however, carried racial science further
than did theorists of other nations, and their eugenics movement was
above all else distinguished by its extreme anti-Semitic component.

The messianic quality of social Darwinism seems to have appealed to the
young Mengele.  His writings suggest that he was especially struck by
their use of the phrase "the fate of mankind."  From his youthful
encounter with their distorted ideals, to his old age, a weary and
broken exile, Mengele would continue to feel a personal allegiance to
the social Darwinists.  At the university, the question of the
"biological quality of mankind" may have been esoteric to most of
Mengele's classmates.  But for him, it was apparently a clarion call.

His account of that period suggests he was deeply upset by the fact
that the lower classes were having many children, while those of
impeccable genetic stock were too busy even to marry.

In 1935, the year Mengele prepared to graduate, the Nazis laid down the
cornerstone of their racial program, the Nuremberg Laws.

The laws introduced complex, ostensibly scientific criteria to
determine who was a true German and who was not.  According to those
laws, Jews were no longer German citizens-citizenship in the Reich
being an honor conferred only on the "racially pure."  Marriages and
sexual relations between Jews and "people of German blood" were now
forbidden and carried severe penalties, including lengthy jail terms.

Jews were expelled from all professions, including academia.  They
could not even employ German servants.

Many of Germany's top scientists and research centers joined forces
with the Nazis and actively helped to implement the Nuremberg Laws.

But none did so with more fervor than the University of Frankfurt's
Professor Otmar von Verschuer, possibly the most acclaimed racial
scientist of his day.  Since the early 1930s, Verschuer had been
receiving generous financial support from the Nazis to build his lavish
new Institute for Heredity, Biology, and Racial Purity, which
specialized in racial studies.  Under his able leadership, the
Frankfurt Institute, with its impressive staff that included a chief
doctor, two medical assistants, and several technicians, did as much
work to advance Nazi political aims as it did genuine scientific
research.  Doctors and scientists from the institute were used by the
Nazis as "expert witnesses" in court to prosecute anyone who broke the
Nuremberg Laws in their dealings with Jews.

At twenty-five, Mengele graduated from Munich with the highest honors,
summa cum laude.  Now both physician and Doktorfater, he contemplated
his next step up the academic ladder.  That would have to be
Verschuer's institute at the University of Frankfurt.  He promptly
applied for and was given a position working as an assistant to
Verschuer, the rising star of Germany's eugenics movement.

Frankfurt in the 1930s was a showplace for the administration of the
new Nazi regime.  The city's ministry of health set up a special unit
just to investigate its residents to determine whether any of them were
secretly tainted with Jewish blood or carried any other "genetic
disease.

"Nearly half the citizens of Frankfurt were on file, their dossiers
bulging with detailed information on their personal backgrounds.

One of Mengele's duties at the institute was to help in this evaluation
of the "racial fitness" of Frankfurt's citizens-really to determine
whether their Aryan ancestry was pure.  Under the Nuremberg Laws, even
individuals with distant Jewish relatives were considered Jewish.

Mengele joined his institute colleagues in helping to assist the
judicial investigations into violations of the law by determining
whether a person charged was indeed a Jew.  Even in the years before
deportations to the camps began, a determination by Mengele that
individuals were racially Jewish could jeopardize their life in
Germany, by stripping them of their livelihood as well as depriving
them of their standing and security.  Within a few years, Mengele's
judgments as to who was and was not a Jew, combined with the thousands
of dossiers compiled by other Frankfurt bureaucrats, would prove most
useful to the Nazis when they were seeking out all those with Jewish
ancestry for deportation to the death camps.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: It was like a nightmare when we arrived.  We could see
the chimneys, and the flames pouring out of these chimneys.  My father
turned to my mother and said,

"You see, Rosie, the Germans are taking us to burn us."

I was ten years old when my family was deported to Auschwitz.

Just one week before, my twin sister, Ruthie, and I had celebrated our
tenth birthday inside the Cluj Ghetto.

I grew up in a middle-class family.  I was born in Brassov, a small
town in Transylvania.  My father worked as a clerk.  My mother, Rosie,
was a housewife.  Ruthie and I were their only children; we were
identical twins.

Mother's entire life was centered around us.  She adored Ruthie and
me-especially Ruthie, who was the livelier twin.

In May 1944, all the Jews in our town were taken to Cluj and forced to
live inside a ghetto.  We went straight from this ghetto to
Auschwitz.

All the Jews of the Gluj Ghetto readily boarded the transports.  We had
no idea we were going to an extermination camp.  No one in our town
knew.

Our local Jewish Council-the Judenrat -had made a secret pact with the
Germans.  The council had arranged for the Nazis to send us postcards
from other Jews who had been deported to the death camps.

In these postcards, people we had known wrote that they were fine.

They said they had been taken to some labor camps in Hungary, and were
working.

And so my father had no idea what Auschwitz was when we arrived.

But when we got out of the cattle car, and he saw the dogs, and the
Nazis in uniform, and the flames billowing out from the crematorium, he
guessed.

We were immediately separated from our father Ruthie and I went with
our mother to one line just for women and children.

There was Mengele, standing at the head of the line.

He was telling people where to go, in what direction-to the right or to
the left, to work or to the gas chambers.

When it was our turn, Mengele immediately asked us if we were twins.

Ruthie and I looked identical.  We had similar hairdos.  We were
wearing the same outfits.

Mengele ordered us to go in a certain direction-and our mother, too.

With his medical training and Ph.  D. in anthropology, Mengele was
well-prepared to excel at the Frankfurt Institute.  His job as an
assistant to Verschuer marked his formal initiation into the world of
Nazi racial medicine.  He quickly rose to become Verschuer's most
trusted young disciple, and they often collaborated on important
projects.  Verschuer clearly saw potential in the malleable young man
who was not only hardworking and determined, but whose ideas were also
politically congenial to Verschuer's own.  Under his aegis, Mengele
learned that it was acceptable-even desirable-to experiment on human
beings if it advanced a scientific cause.  The professor provided the
critical link in Mengele's transformation from an ambitious young
scientist into a camp doctor who sent Jews to their deaths and
performed grotesque experiments on children.

Indeed, the obsession with twins that Mengele would later exhibit at
Auschwitz was also a direct result of his association with Verschuer.

In the 1920s, when Verschuer had been head of the genetics department
at Berlin's Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, the leading research center in
Germany, his work had focused almost exclusively on twins.  Mengele's
mentor was convinced that twins held the key to unlocking the mysteries
of genetics.  He wrote in one textbook that experimenting on twins
would enable scientists to make "a reliable determination of what is
hereditary in man."  Verschuer, however, is not known to have conducted
any so-called

"In vivo experiments on living twins.  He restrained himself either
because of long-standing rules forbidding the use of human guinea pigs
that traditionally bound the scientific community, or because of his
own devoutly Catholic upbringing.  Until the war removed such
protocols, his work, instead, like that of so many other researchers on
twins, was based on observation and patient comparisons.

Verschuer did, however, instill in his young assistant his confidence
of how useful twins' studies, including "in vivo" research, could be.

EVA MOZES: During the journey to Auschwitz, our father had gathered the
family near him in a corner of the cattle car.  "Promise me that if any
of you survive this terrible war, you will go to Palestine," he told
us.

We arrived at Auschwitz in the early spring of 1944.  There were six of
us: my mother and my father, my older sisters, Edith and Alice, and me
and my twin, Miriam.

My father, Alexander Mores, was a very religious man.  He opened his
prayer book and began to pray-right there, in the crowded cattle car.

But since Jews have to pray facing east, he had to pause for a moment
to figure out in which direction he should turn.

He opened his prayer book and began calmly to read amid the cries of
hungry children and their terrified parents.  A few others in our car
joined him in the recitation of the Shema, the ritual Hebrew morning
prayer.

When the doors to our cattle car opened, I heard SS soldiers yelling,
"Schnell!  Schnelll" ("Faster!  Faster!"), and ordering everybody
out.

My mother grabbed Miriam and me by the hand.  She was always trying to
protect us because we were the youngest.

Everything was moving very fast, and as I looked around, I noticed my
father and my two older sisters were gone.

As I clutched my mother's hand, an SS man hurried by shouting,
"Twins!

Twins!"  He stopped to look at us.  Miriam and I looked very much
alike.  We were wearing similar clothes.

"Are they twins?"  he asked my mother.  "Is that good?"  she replied.

He nodded yes.

"They are twins," she said.

L A LORINCzI: My twin brother, Menashe, and I were vacationing with our
grandparents in Transylvania when the Germans came in March 1944.  My
grandparents tried to send us home to our mother in Cluj.  But we were
not permitted to travel.

The police rounded us up and placed us in a ghetto.  Menashe and I
celebrated our tenth birthday inside this ghetto.  As a birthday
present, our grandmother gave each of us one slice of bread.

From the ghetto, we were all placed in cattle cars and taken to
Auschwitz.  When we got off the trains, we could hear the Germans
yelling,

"Twins, twins!"

My grandmother naively believed our mother was there, and had
instructed the guards to be "on the lookout" for us.  She thought that
was why they were calling for twins.

And so Grandmother pushed us out of the line going to the gas chamber
and said,

"You are going to your mother."  She thrust into our hands a toothbrush
and toothpaste.

As Mengele was absorbing Verschuer's values, he was also working
extremely hard to please his mentor.  As a result of his diligence,
Mengele became not only a special pet of Verschuer at work but also a
frequent guest at the director's residence, where he often stayed for
dinner.

There were personal factors that strengthened the bond between the
young would-be scientist and the dean of Nazi racial hygiene.

Mengele was far from home, and deeply in need of a parental figure to
give him support.  While in Gunzburg, Mengele had suffered from his
father's self-absorption, the fact that he was more involved in his
factory than with his sons.  Mengele was naturally drawn to Otmar von
Verschuer, who was a personable, fatherly man with several children of
his own, as well as a brilliant scientist.  In establishing a close tie
with Verschuer, Mengele found both the paternal attention he longed
for and reaffirmation of his own talents.

In many ways, the impressionable Mengele was an ideal protege for the
opportunistic Verschuer.  The professor could and did channel Mengele's
zeal to distinguish himself to advance the institute and, in turn, the
cause of the Nazis.  Mengele's mixture of intense vanity and insecurity
made him ripe for manipulation.  Young Mengele would be groomed to be a
"biological soldier" who would obey Verschuer's orders in the
laboratory as completely as a soldier in the battlefield.

While Mengele toiled away in the laboratory, his politically savvy
mentor was spending time currying favor with Germany's new rulers.

Verschuer, who was in constant communication with the Nazi hierarchy,
paid frequent tribute to Hitler in his various publications.  His
articles routinely praised the Fuhrer, damned the Jews, and called for
ever more drastic measures to eliminate them from German society.

Verschuer's anti-Semitic rhetoric grew more vivid with the increasing
power of the Nazi regime.

Ultimately, Verschuer helped give the Final Solution-the plan to kill
all the Jews of Europe-intellectual respectability.  Although he never
held high office in the Reich, his published opinions carried
considerable weight.  The Nazis relied on him to offer scientific
rationales for their more brutal actions.  Not coincidentally, the more
he endorsed the Nazi line, the greater became his prestige and
influence.

As a perceptive American investigator at the Nuremberg trials later
observed, Verschuer "sacrificed his pure scientific knowledge in order
to secure for himself the applause and the favor of the Nazi
tyrants."

By 1938, Mengele was beginning to enjoy considerable professional
success and recognition.  He had just completed and published his
second doctoral dissertation, which was along similar lines of his
earlier Munich treatise, a study of the general area of the human
jaw.

This new thesis clearly reflected Verschuer's influence.  While the
earlier paper had been primarily a factual study, Mengele now began to
formulate theories on the "racial origins" of hereditary traits such as
the cleft palate and the harelip.

Mengele's personal life, once limited to group outings and casual
flirtations, was also flourishing.  That same year he became engaged to
Irene Schoenbein, a lovely young German woman he had met while on
holiday.  But even as they set a wedding date, Mengele was summoned for
a three-month stint in the Wehrmacht, the German Army.  Preparations
for war were under way, and young men around the country were being
called up for training.  Mengele was assigned to a mountain regiment in
the Tyrol-seemingly an ideal assignment for the young man who enjoyed
skiing and hiking.

But Mengele's experience in the Wehrmacht proved to have a fateful
impact on his life.  According to Dr.  Kurt Lambertz, one of his best
friends from the period, Mengele developed an intense dislike of the
unit's commanding officer.  The personality clash ended in a brawl
between the two.  Although Mengele completed his training period, his
career in the Wehrmacht was finished.  He decided instead to join the
SS-the Nazis' most elite and ruthless corps of soldiers.  As a young
officer/ doctor Mengele was assured of a distinguished future, serving
with the brightest, the most dashing-and the most fanatic-Nazis.

Mengele and Irene were married in July 1939.  Weeks later, war broke
out and Mengele found himself drafted.  His first assignment was an
administrative post at the SS Race and Resettlement Office, reviewing
applications for German citizenship.  In the countries surrounding
Germany, such as the Soviet Union and other Slavic lands, there were
hundreds of thousands of people who claimed German ancestry.  In
Hitler's view of the world, the German "nation" encompassed all
Germans-wherever they might be living.  It was the duty of the Reich to
bring them back into the fold.  Mengele's office was charged with
sorting through the applications to determine the "real" Germans: those
who met the racial and genealogical criteria.

It was almost two years before Mengele got his first taste of combat.

In June 1941, he was sent to the Ukraine as part of the Waffen SS.

He proved to be an excellent soldier, and received the Iron Cross,
Second Class, for his heroic service on the battlefield.  The following
year, he joined the SS Viking Division as a field physician.  Here,
Mengele finally practiced medicine, but under the worst conditions.

Epidemics were common during the hot, sticky summers.  Winters were so
cold as to be unbearable.  Thousands of men died every day in fierce
battles, and there was neither enough equipment nor medication to keep
the wounded alive.

It was on the Russian front that Mengele honed the art of selection.

Due to the shortage of time and supplies, he was forced to make snap
decisions as to who among the wounded would be treated, and who would
be left to die.  The task of choosing among the German soldiers was
gruesome to Mengele, and he hated it, he later told friends and
colleagues.  But he resolved to be dedicated and brave.  He ended up
being awarded the Iron Cross, First Class, for pulling two wounded
soldiers from a burning tank under enemy fire.  As one commendation he
received stated, Mengele had "conducted himself brilliantly in the face
of the enemy.

TWINS' FATH R (ZYL SPIEG L): "Were you ever a soldier?"  Mengele asked
me after he had pulled me out of the selection line.

I had been standing with a group of twins.  Because of my years as an
officer, I tended to stand very straight.  Mengele noticed that
immediately.

I told Mengele about my background in the Czech military.  Because of
this, Mengele appointed me to be in charge of the twin boys.  My title
would be

"Twins' Father."  I was to supervise about eighty boy twins.

But he warned me that if anything went wrong, I would be killed on the
spot.

At the end of 1942, Mengele was wounded-it is unclear ho wand declared
unfit for combat.  He was sent back to Germany and reunited with his
wife and his old mentor, Verschuer.  The SS reassigned him to their
Race and Resettlement Office, working in the Berlin Division overseeing
the concentration camps.  It was another desk job, far from the
scientific work he loved.

Sometime that year, Verschuer had left Frankfurt to assume the lofty
position of director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin,
possibly the most prestigious scientific job in Germany.  As Mengele
grew disillusioned with his bureaucratic job, Verschuer and he began
exploring other options that would get him back where he wanted to be:
inside a laboratory.

Both Mengele and Verschuer were aware of the exciting research being
undertaken in some of the concentration camps.  Since 1939,
medical-research projects of various kinds had been under way,
including experiments perfumed on human subjects.  All known standards
of medical ethics had been swept aside by the Nazis.  To find a cure
for typhoid fever, the bane of the German Army, Nazi doctors infected
prisoners at the Buchenwald camp with the virus, then tried to "treat"
them by injecting them with various serums.  At Dachau and other camps,
Jews and other inmates were exposed to tuberculosis, cholera,
diphtheria, smallpox, influenza, and yellow fever as the Nazis tried to
learn how to control these deadly maladies.  Nineteen Fortytwo was also
the year when German doctors began their gruesome attempts to discover
the most efficient method of mass sterilization.

By far the most intriguing research possibilities were offered at the
Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.  It was at Auschwitz that a
certain Dr.  Horst Schumann had begun exposing men, women, and children
to massive doses of radiation-a promising way of achieving the desired
sterilization.  The largest of all the camps, Auschwitz had more than
ten thousand inmates arriving each day-an unimagined number of
potential human subjects.  They could provide a scientist with a broad
cross-section of racial groups.  Twins and other interesting genetic
specimens were likely to pass through as well.

MAGDA SPIEGEL: I was twenty-nine years old, married, with a son of my
own, when my family was deported to Auschwitz from our village in
Czechoslovakia.

We had all made the trip in the same cattle car, but we were separated
the minute we arrived.  My mother, my son, and I were told to go to the
left side, toward the crematoriums.

SS guards were yelling,

"Twins, twins, we want twins."  I saw a very good-looking man coming
toward me.  It was Mengele.

He was with two guards, and my twin brother, Zyl.  My brother had told
Mengele he was a twin, and that he had a sister.

Twigs' FATHER: To this day, I am not sure why I admitted I was a
twin.

My previous experience in labor camps had taught me never to volunteer
for anything.

Magda and I were born in 1915 in Budapest.  When we were little, our
family had moved to Munkacs, a town in Czechoslovakia renowned
throughout Europe for its flourishing Jewish community.

When I was twenty-one, I was drafted into the Czech military, [where] I
became an officer.  But because I was Jewish, I was ultimately sent to
a series of labor camps.  When I came back to my hometown, it was only
to be placed in the Jewish ghetto.

From there, my entire family-my parents, my twin sister, and her
son-were put in a cattle car bound for Auschwitz.

Once I had informed Mengele I had a twin sister, he went looking for
her-and plucked her out of the lines marching to the gas chambers.

MAGDA SPIEGEL: Mengele pointed to Zyl and asked me,

"Are you the twin of this man?"

I said yes.

Then, Mengele noticed my child.  "Who is this little boy?"  he asked.

"He is my son," I answered.

"Please leave the boy with your mother," Mengele told me very nicely.

With the aid of Verschuer, Mengele obtained a position as an SS doctor
at Auschwitz.  Verschuer even helped Mengele win grants to undertake
two research projects at the camp.  He was to begin in April 1943.

What a splendid laboratory Auschwitz promised to be!  Unique in the
world of science, it offered unlimited possibilities for work.  . . for
medicine .  . . for experiments.  At last, the chance to do the kind of
research Mengele had dreamed of.  At Auschwitz, there would be nothing
to stand in his way.

HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: Mother was determined to hold on to us.  She hid
us under her skirt.

But at the last minute, she told us,

"Go to Dr.  Mengele.  He is asking for twins.  Go and we will meet by
the gate.

"Wait for me, children, wait for me," she cried.  "We will meet again
by the gate."

two.

AUSCHWITZ MOVIE.

MAGDA SPIEGEL.

A few hours after arriving at Auschwitz, I asked some people,

"Where is my little boy?"  My son was only seven years old.  I was very
worried about him.

"You see these chimneys?"  they replied, pointing toward the
crematoriums.  "Your child is there.  Your parents are there.  Your
entire family is there.  And one day, you will also be there."

This was told to me the same day I had come-the same day.

Dr.  Mengele was the only person who was always standing there when the
trains came.  He was constantly making selections.

The sky was red- red- the whole sky was red!

It was the last year of the transports, and the Germans were putting
masses-masses and masses-of people into the crematorium.

It was like watching a movie.

Even early in the morning, the sky over Auschwitz looked opaque and
foreboding, as if it were covered by a vast blood-soaked sheet.  An
oppressive smell permeated the air-soot and burning flesh, fumes from
the crematoriums, and smoke from the arriving trains.

After the trains had pulled in and the cattle-car doors were opened,
exhausted cargoes of Jews tumbled out.  As SS men shouted,

"Faster!

Faster!," hordes of people were pushed tllis way and that by the
uniformed guards.  Women cried as their husbands were taken away from
them.  Old men clutched their wives in a final embrace.  Small children
huddled closer to their parents, sad and subdued.  And the Nazis
stomped around, cracking their whips on anyone who stood in their way,
and even on those who were merely standing.

VERA BLAU: When I arrived at Auschwitz in April 1944, my first
impression was that it was very crowded.

My twin sister, Rachel, and I were eleven years old.  We had come with
our mother and little brother, and both of us started crying when we
were separated from them.  Then a woman from Czechoslovakia came over
to us.  She had been in Auschwitz a long time.

"Do not cry, children, do not cry," she said to us.  "You see, they are
burning your parents."

I did not believe her.  I did not want to believe her.

What is universally known today as Auschwitz is in fact something of a
misnomer.  Auschwitz was the slave-labor camp in which murder was an
everyday phenomenon, but, in fact, the Polish place name became the
umbrella word for several camps.  Although the slaves largely labored
at Auschwitz, it was at Birkenau, a couple of miles away, that many of
them were executed.  And although the world lexicon came to equate
Auschwitz with the gas chambers, it was Birkenau that was the actual
extermination center.  It was Birkenau where the ovens never stopped
flaming and where SS physicians regularly dispatched inmates to the
crematorium; and it was Birkenau where Dr.  Mengele worked in his
laboratory, and where his beloved twins were bar racked and where so
many of them inevitably perished.

Just one year after arriving at the death camp, Mengele was thoroughly
absorbed in his research, the first step of which was selecting his
subjects.  Every morning, at the crack of dawn, he could be seen in the
area where the transports disembarked, scanning the new arrivals.

Standing there in his perfectly tailored SS uniform, white gloves, and
officer's cap, Mengele looked impeccable-a host greeting guests
arriving at his home.  He sometimes stood for hours without flinching,
a hint of a smile on his face, his elegantly gloved hand beckoning the
prisoners to the right or to the left.  Often, he whistled softly as he
worked, the Blue Danube waltz, or an aria from his favorite Puccini
opera.

Mengele even engaged some of the new arrivals in friendly conversation,
asking them how the journey had been, and how they were feeling.  If
they complained of being sick, he listened with a sympathetic ear-and
then sent them straightaway to die in the gas chambers.  He actually
seemed interested in hearing all the gruesome details: how
uncomfortable the trip had been, how cramped and stifling the cattle
cars were, how many Jews had died along the way.

Occasionally, Mengele pulled aside inmates and asked them to write
"postcards" to their relatives back home.  He seemed to take a special
pleasure in dictating these notes, describing how lovely Auschwitz was,
and urging everyone to visit.  But once the postcards were prepared,
their authors were summarily dispatched to the gas chambers.

Only when an interesting "specimen" came along did Mengele really
spring to life.  He urgently motioned to a nearby guard to yank the new
arrival out of the line.  SS guards were ordered to watch for any
unusual or striking genetic material-the dwarfs, the giants, the
hunchbacks-and to bring them immediately to Mengele.  But most
important of all to him were the twins.

ZYL THE SAILOR: My twin brother and I were marching toward the gas
chambers when we heard people yelling,

"Twins!  twins!"  We were yanked out of the lines and brought over to
Dr.  Mengele.

I was not quite thirteen years old when my family was deported to
Auschwitz-I hadn't been bar mitzvahed yet.  I came from a small village
in Hungary where my father's family had lived for generations.

My mother came from Galicia, in Poland.  There were eight children in
our family.

When we stepped off the cattle car, there was Dr.  Mengele.

He was making the selections, deciding who would go to work and who
would go to the gas chambers.  He used his finger.  He motioned
everyone in my family in the direction of the crematorium.

As we marched to the crematorium, our mother told us,

"You must not cry."  To this day, I do not know who told the Germans we
were twins and had us removed from the line.

MENASHE LORINCZI: Nobody knew whether it was good or bad to be a
twin.

Although the SS guards were going around asking for twins, families
were afraid to volunteer their children.

Many twins died because their parents didn't want to be separated from
them.  Mothers walked with their twins straight into the gas
chambers.

EVA MOZES: Once the SS guard knew we were twins, Miriam and I were
taken away from our mother, without any warning or explanation.

Our screams fell on deaf ears.  I remember looking back and seeing my
mother's arms stretched out in despair as we were led away by a
soldier.

That was the last time I ever saw her.

The twins who passed through the gates of Auschwitz were of all ages,
but often they were very young children who fought and cried at being
separated from their loved ones.  If Mengele was on the scene, he tried
to soothe the terrified parents.  He would smile as he comforted an
anguished mother, insisting her twins would be in good hands.

And if the twins were just infants, Mengele might sometimes pull their
mother out of the line as well, permitting her to accompany and look
after them.  Most often, however, the children were taken away alone.

Once separated from their parents, the twins were marched through the
camp, where they witnessed scenes of unparalleled horror.  Piles of
corpses were everywhere.  Lying next to them, and virtually
indistinguishable, were men and women thin as skeletons.  These were
the

"Mussulmans"-the half-dead, with no strength or will to live, who were
simply awaiting being carted to the gas chamber.  A foul odor permeated
the camp, which, combined with the heat, made it difficult to breathe.
It was an absolute assault on the senses.  Children clung to their
twin, their last remaining links with the families they had lost.

The twins' initiation into Auschwitz formally began when they, like all
new inmates, were showered and branded.  They cried out in pain as
numbers were etched into their flesh with searing metal rods.

But unlike the other prisoners, who were given camp uniforms and whose
heads were shaved, the twins were allowed to keep both their clothes
and their long hair.  These differences made them immediately
recognizable as

"Mengele's children."

Despite these small privileges, the twins sank into despair within
hours of arrival as they began to understand what had happened to their
families.  Once in their own compound, where at any given time there
could be scores of twins, boys and girls separately lodged, they were
briefed by the other children about the realities of life and death at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Those newcomers who had not understood what they
had seen were told about the gas chambers and crematoriums, and the
probable fate of the family members they had left behind.  In the case
of male twins, whose wooden barracks stood only yards away from the
crematorium, virtually facing it, Twins' Father took it upon himself to
break the news gently, and at times delayed it for days or weeks.  The
little girls, who had no such parental figure to ease the transition,
were less fortunate.  Even though many of the children chose not to
accept, or were too young to fully comprehend, what they were told
about their own parents, it was a devastating moment.

MOsHE OFFER: I felt so tired, that first day at Auschwitz.  There was
a terrible smell -it was impossible to escape the smell.

I was very worried about my mother, my father, and my four brothers.  I
talked with [my twin brother] Tibi about them.

But he was sure our mother was going to be safe.

HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: We kept crying and looking for our mother.  She
had promised she would meet us at the gate.

We would search among the women for her dress.  When we were separated,
she'd been wearing a striking black dress with pink strawberries.

We couldn't eat.  We were constantly crying and looking toward the gate
for our mother.

Finally, the head of our barracks said,

"Come here" and pointed to the crematorium.

"I can now tell you that your mother and the rest of your family went
to the gas chambers."

EVA MOZ S: In the early evening, we were finally taken to our
barracks.

There, we met other twins, some of whom had been at Auschwitz a long
time.

There were only girls in the barracks, I can't remember exactly how
many.  Maybe hundreds of little girls.  The barracks themselves were
filthy.  They had these red brick ovens [for heating] running across
them, and wooden bunk beds, without pillows.  [We] slept two, three,
four girls to a bunk bed.

That first night, we went to the latrines.  They were just holes in the
ground, with waste in them.  There was no running water.  Everything
stank.

I remember seeing three dead children on the ground.  Later, we would
always be finding dead children on the floor of the latrines.

From our barracks, we could see huge smoking chimneys towering high
above the camp.  There were glowing flames rising from above them.

"What are they burning so late in the evening?"  I asked the other
children.

"The Germans are burning people," they answered.

But the new twins also learned that, as proteges of the powerful Dr.
Mengele, their own lives in this kingdom of death were guaranteed.

Mengele made sure that his twins would be generally well-treated, at
least by Auschwitz standards.  They were spared the beatings and
punishments inflicted on other inmates.  Because they "belonged" to
Mengele, no one, not even the most brutal camp guards, would dare lay a
hand on them.  In addition to keeping their clothes and hair, some of
the twins, especially the boys, recall receiving somewhat better food
rations than the other prisoners.  Although all the twins say they were
ravenously hungry throughout their stay, several remember having access
to potatoes and slices of bread, which enabled them to survive.

If caught stealing food-as many did, on a regular basis-they were not
severely punished because of their protected status.  Most important,
the twins were not subjected to the terrifying random selections that
adult prisoners faced.  As long as they stayed healthy and useful to
Dr.  Mengele, they would be kept alive.

The work habits Mengele had developed over the years in Munich and
Frankfurt stood him in good stead at Auschwitz.  Since his arrival in
May 1943, Mengele had distinguished himself in the eyes of the Nazi
hierarchy.  A superior's evaluation praised him for being "an excellent
officer," who had shown "maturity and strength."  The report stressed
how Mengele had not displayed "any weakness in character or
inhibition," in the resolute way he selected people to die.  And one
doctor who served with Mengele at Auschwitz, Dr.  Munch, remembers him
as much more diligent than other SS physicians, many of whom had been
dragooned into service at the death camp.  This perception of Mengele
as more hardworking than his Nazi colleagues is echoed by numerous
adult survivors who had the chance to observe him at close range, and
who would go on to write about it in their memoirs and testimonies.

Mengele's experimental barracks were a showcase of the concentration
camp, talked about and admired by the Nazi hierarchy.

In many ways, the twins' compound at Auschwitz was a realization of
Mengele's-and Verschuer's-greatest scientific dream.  Verschuer, from
his position as director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, was
closely involved in his protege's research, and the two men
corresponded regularly.  Mengele periodically dispatched to his mentor
not only reports about his research, but also laboratory samples from
his experiments.

TWINS' FATH R: The moment a pair of twins arrived in the barrack, they
were asked to complete a detailed questionnaire from the Kaiser-Wilhelm
Institute in Berlin.  One of my duties as Twins' Father was to help
them fill it out, especially the little ones, who couldn't read or
write.

These forms contained dozens of detailed questions related to a child's
background, health, and physical characteristics.  They asked for the
age, weight, and height of the children, their eye color and the color
of their hair.  They were promptly mailed to Berlin when they were
completed.

After the form was filled out, I would take the twins to Mengele, who
asked them additional questions.  Mengele had an office and a beautitul
blond secretary.  Because many of the children only knew Hungarian-and
Mengele spoke only German-I would serve as the translator.  His
gorgeous secretary would write it all down.

Much of the information Mengele was seeking had to do with
demographics-where the family was from, what the parents had done fora
living.

His secretary would measure the children, while Mengele examined
them.

He was especially interested in their hair.  I recall he would look
closely at the roots, to see how it was growing.

The questions were connected to the experiments Mengele would later
make on the twins.

One day, I was filling out forms for a new pair of twins and I noticed
the date of birth one child had given me was different from the birth
date of his sibling.  It was obvious they were not really twins.  But I
knew that if anyone learned of this, the boys would immediately be put
to death.

And so I decided to take a chance, and put down false information.

I "made" them twins.  I knew if Mengele learned of what I had done, he
would kill both me and the children on the spot.

And throughout my stay at the camp, I was always afraid-but also
secretly delighted-at what I had done in slipping through these false
twins.  I felt I had tricked the great Dr.  Mengele.

The detailed questionnaires were designed to ensure the validity of
Mengele's work.  If the experiments were to have any relevance, they
had to be precise and carefully controlled.  While Nazi racial
scientists considered identical twins, whose gene pool was exactly
alike, as most desirable for study, fraternal twins were also useful.

Whatever the case, the more information gathered about a twin's genetic
background, the greater the chances of conducting meaningful
experiments.

Mengele's overall aim-and that of Verschuer-was to test various genetic
theories in support of Hitler's racial dogmas.  Like other Nazi
scientists, Mengele hoped to prove that most human characteristics,
from the shape of the nose to the color of the eye to obesity and left
handedness were inherited.  In addition, it is believed Mengele was
searching for ways to induce multiple births, so as to repopulate the
depleted German Army.  The ultimate goal was to produce an ideal race
of Aryan men and women endowed with only the finest genetic traits, who
would rapidly multiply and rule the world.

For the sake of his experiments, Mengele tried to create an atmosphere
that was, in sharp contrast to everything else taking place in
Auschwitz, as close to normal as possible.  He installed a small
furnished office at one end of the twins' compound to help him monitor
his child guinea pigs.  He decreed that guards were to be held
accountable if any of the twins fell ill or died, hoping this would
motivate them to look after the children.  If a twin died during the
night, Mengele would storm through the compound in the morning,
screaming at the guards, demanding an explanation.  He also implemented
a strict routine to regulate the twins' lives.  Every morning at six
o'clock, they were to be up for roll call in front of their barracks.

Then came breakfast, a mug of tepid, muddied water the Germans called
coffee, and perhaps a slice of moldy bread.  Then Mengele would appear
at the compound shortly thereafter for an inspection tour.

EVA MOZES: My first meeting with Dr.  Mengele was the morning after I
had arrived.

The twins had to stand on roll call, no matter how young they were, no
matter how cold it was.  The procedure could last anywhere from fifteen
minutes to over an hour.

The Germans had to account for everyone.  Once that was finished,
Mengele came.  He was very much like a general reviewing his troops
-except we were his guinea pigs.

I remember Mengele came almost every day, and he always wore his SS
uniform and tall black boots.  They were very shiny boots.

I was terrified of him.

As an SS doctor, Mengele had many concerns and responsibilities in
addition to the twins.  He performed selections among the new arrivals
on the Birkenau ramp and also inside the women's compound, daily
dispatching hundreds to be killed.  He oversaw a kind of sham hospital
for the sick, where, alas, little care was provided.  But he seemed to
spend most of his time with the children.  Typically, Mengele gave
daily orders to have several of the twins "prepared" for experiments.

He would ask Twins' Father or other adult supervisors to get the
children ready by taking them to be bathed and cleaned.  Special
trucks emblazoned with fake Red Cross insignia arrived to pick up the
youngsters and deliver them to Mengele's laboratories.  Depending on
the type of tests, the twins were driven to any one of several
locations either within Birkenau or at Auschwitz proper.  The children
learned what to expect, depending on their destination.  In one
laboratory, they knew it was a matter only of routine X rays and blood
tests.  Other clinics were reserved for more complicated-and
painful-experiments.  One Mengele lab the twins never saw was his
pathology unit, located convenienlly on the site of a crematorium.

There, an assistant to Mengele toiled quietly, performing autopsies on
the bodies of the twins who had died, or been killed, in the course of
experiments.

The blood tests were the most basic component of Mengele's program.

Virtually all the twins were subjected to daily withdrawals of blood.

These tests may have been connected to the grant he received from the
prestigious German Research Association to study "specific proteins," a
project funded at Verschuer's express request.  Blood, often in large
quantities, was drawn from twins' fingers and arms, and sometimes both
their arms simultaneously.  The youngest children, whose arms and hands
were very small, suffered the most: Blood was drawn from their necks, a
painful and frightening procedure.  The blood was then analyzed in a
special laboratory located near Birkenau.

Although Mengele was invariably present during the experiments, the
tests themselves were often administered by his assistants.  Typically,
these were Jewish inmates who had been doctors and nurses before the
war, and had been spared the gas chamber because of their skills.

Most had profound misgivings about their work.  But they knew that to
betray any hesitation in administering an injection or test, even a
very gruesome one, would result in their immediate execution.  In spite
of their anguishing position, a few managed also to alleviate suffering
and helped save some lives.

ALex DeKEL: I never saw a doctor smiling.  They were very depressed,
all of them.

I lived in the same place as these doctors.  I saw them going through
their duties like robots, like machines.  They would come back at night
to sleep, and wake up early in the morning to report back to the
laboratory.

If I ever approached any of them and tried to ask them a question, they
would not answer me.

MAGDA SPIEGEL: There were many Jewish doctors living in our section of
the camp women doctors, men doctors, anthropologists, eye doctors, ear
doctors.

Mengele came every day to speak with them and give them orders on what
to do with each twin.

There was a beautiful female doctor named Anna.  She was originally
from Czechoslovakia, and she had been a very famous physician before
the war.  She was one of the few Jewish doctors who was able to get
close to Mengele.

He liked beautiful women, and Dr.  Anna was lovely.  Dr.  Anna was
always walking around with Mengele, accompanying him on his rounds.

She was very kind-very compassionate toward the twins.  She knew, for
example, that I was upset about my son.  She tried to comfort me.  She
would never admit to me he had been gassed.

Finally, she said to me,

"Ask Mengele."

I went over to Mengele and asked him as calmly as I could,

"Where is my little boy?"

"He is in kindergarten," he replied, smiling.  Then, he walked away.

I wanted to die.  There was a fence near our barracks-a barbed wire
fence-where inmates would commit suicide.  I threw myself on the barbed
wire, but some women prisoners ran and pulled me off of it.

Although Mengele's assistants were responsible for administering the
tests, Mengele occasionally liked to step in and lend a hand.  He
looked the twins over carefully, searching for genetic abnormalities or
any other unusual conditions.  Then, he would demonstrate the "proper"
way to insert a syringe or draw blood.  He would lecture the Jewish
doctors on how to avoid hurting the children.  As if he were their old
family physician, he brought candy or chocolates along to pacify the
youngsters.  Mengele knew how to treat children and calm them down so
the experiments could proceed.  He intuitively understood how much he
needed the children's trust for his research to succeed; good results
would be obtained only if they were cooperative.

But he also knew that the twins, especially the very young ones, were
terrified of the procedures, especially the injections.

EVA KUPAS: Once, I wanted to go see my twin brother.  So Dr.  Mengele
took me by the hand and walked with me over to where he was staying.

Mengele held my hand the whole way.

VERA BLAU: They took blood from us every day.  But when Mengele made
the blood tests, he was much more gentle than the nurses.  He liked
little children and was strict about keeping them well.  He would get
very angry if a twin was sick.

Countless experiments were performed on the twins at any given time.

Although the full scope of those tests will never be known, although
the records are scanty and the child victims of Mengele's most
diabolical work are gone, some details are known about both his
practices and intent.

EVA MOZ S: We were always naked during the experiments.

We were marked, painted, measured, observed.  Boys and girls were
together.  It was all so demeaning.  There was no place to hide, no
place to go.

They compared every part of our body with that of our twin.  The tests
would last for hours.

And Mengele was always there, supervising.

SOLOMON MALIK: Mengele would look at each of the twins and see what
interested him the most.  We were his guinea pigs.  We were his
laboratory.

Mengele once put a needle in my arm-only the needle, not the syringe.

Blood started spurting out.  He calmly placed the blood in a test
tube.

Then, he gave me a sugar cube.

Mo SHE OFFER: One morning, at roll call, my number and that ofTibi were
announced as part of the group that was going for experiments.  We were
taken with some other children by ambulance to a laboratory.  The
doctors took many X rays of us.

Then, Dr.  Mengele walked in.  He was wearing a white gown, but
underneath his gown I could see his SS uniform and boots.

He gave me some candy, and then he gave me an injection that was
extremely painful.

"Nicht angst," Mengele told me in German.  "Don't be afraid."

The line between science and quackery was not a very fine one at
Auschwitz.  Mengele's experiments, although ostensibly performed in the
name of scientific truth, followed few scientific principles.  Mengele
would test one twin and not the other.  At times, siblings were
injected simultaneously as they stood naked side by side.  Despite the
preferential treatment, the occasional shows of kindness, the children
endured unspeakable pain and humiliation.

The eye studies were especially gruesome.  In their desire to create a
race of perfect Aryans, the Nazis wanted to produce children with
lustrous blond hair and blue eyes.  Was it possible to genetically
engineer such traits?  A major focus of Mengele's studies involved
changing the color of the twins' hair and eyes.  (His fascination with
hair had led him to allow the twins to wear it long.  Their hair was
continually being analyzed and compared with that of their siblings.)
The eye studies were in part undertaken on behalf of Mengele's Berlin
colleague Dr.  Karin Magnussen, one of Versclluer's top assistants at
the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, who was preparing a special study on eyes
using data gathered by Mengele at Auschwitz.  This data came from
painful and barbaric tests that were difficult to administer.  At
times, Mengele's assistants used eye-drops to insert chemicals into the
children's eyes; other times, they used needles.

H DVAH AND LEAN STERN: Mengele was trying to change the color of our
eyes.  One day, we were given eye-drops.  Afterwards, we could not see
for several days.  We thought the Nazis had made us blind.

We were very frightened of the experiments.  They took a lot of blood
from us.  We fainted several times, and the SS guards were very
amused.

We were not very developed.  The Nazis made us remove our clothes, and
then they took photographs of us.

The SS guards would point to us and laugh.  We stood naked in front of
these young Nazi thugs, shaking from cold and fear, and they laughed.

The strict veil of secrecy imposed over the experiments enabled Mengele
to work more effectively.  Twins who were subjected to the most
grotesque procedures took his secrets to their graves.  And those as
yet unhurt had only secondhand stories about what was being done.

No one at Auschwitz-not the prisoners, not the SS guards, not even
other doctors-knew precisely what Mengele was doing with his twins,
either while they were alive or after they had died.  Even the children
who themselves were the subjects of his tests did not know what the
objectives of the experiments were.  Rumors were rampant, especially
when children were taken out in Red Cross trucks, never to be seen
again.

There was a calculated effort by Mengele to limit information,
presumably to keep his "guinea pigs" from panicking.  One can only
guess how the twins would have reacted had they known of the existence
of Mengele's lugubrious pathology laboratory where bodies of children
were daily brought over to his assistants to have still more "tests"
performed.

The secrecy enabled Mengele to establish an ostensibly friendly rapport
with the twins-at least, the very young ones.  He loved to sit and chat
with them.  He seemed more relaxed, more himself, in the twins'
barracks than anywhere else at Auschwitz.  Only with those young
children could he joke and laugh.  With them, he was the Beppo his
friends and family in Gunzburg had known-ineffably sweet, charming, and
affectionate.

Mengele especially seemed to dote on the very youngest twins, the
toddlers who could hardly walk and talk, and were completely dependent
on him.  There was a little boy, about three or four years old, who
bore a striking resemblance to Mengele himself.  He was a dark child,
with large brown eyes, a round face, and a gentle disposition.

Mengele came to the barracks often to visit this one child, scooping
him up in his arms, kissing him, and showering him with toys and
chocolates.  When asked his name, the boy would reply,

"My name is Mengele."  The Auschwitz doctor himself had taught the
child to say this, as a father would teach his son.

VERA BLAU: Mengele loved this child.  He had a twin brother, but
Mengele played only with him.

I believe Josef Mengele loved children-even though he was a murderer
and a killer.  Yes!  I remember him as a gentle man.

During this period, Mengele himself had become a father.  His son,
Rolf, was born on March Il, 1944, when Mengele had been at Auschwitz
for almost one year.  But he could rarely get away from the camp to
spend time with Irene and the baby.  Mengele may have been lavishing
displaced affection for his own son on the little Jewish boy.

The twins were Mengele's pampered children-the most privileged
inhabitants of Auschwitz.  He arranged more and more perquisites for
them.  Zyl Spiegel, the Twins' Father, was permitted to hold makeshift
classes and recreation periods to entertain the youngsters.  An avid
sportsman in his own youth, Mengele personally organized soccer matches
with teams composed of the twins.  It was an eerie sight for other
inmates to observe the children running, shouting, tossing a ball.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: Mengele took us to a concert once.  I still remember
it-because it was so awful.

It was held just outside our compound.  The orchestra was made up
entirely of women prisoners.  Listening to them play was
heartbreaking.

It reminded us so much of normal life.  . . the life we'd had before
the life that other people still led.

TWINS' FATHER: I felt very sorry for the young twins.  I was always
trying to make their lives a little more bearable.

I was twenty-nine years old when I was deported.  I felt at least that
I had tasted life-whereas most of the twins hadn't even begun to
live.

I saw my most important task as maintaining the children's morale.

That was difficult, because there were so many periods when I myself
despaired of ever surviving the concentration camp.

Quite often, twins would come over to me and start crying.  They missed
their parents.  Or else they were hungry, and their stomachs were
hurting.

I would try to comfort them.  I calmed them down by telling them they
would be meeting up with their parents within a very short time.

The twins wanted more than anything else to go home.  They would ask me
if I thought the war would ever end.  I would reassure them.  I
promised I would take them home myself the day it was over.

They believed me.  They looked up to me, I guess.

I organized classes.  I would teach them math, history, geography.

We had no books, of course.  But I still gave them simple exercises to
do.  I taught them whatever I could remember from my own school days.

I would also talk to them about the day the war would end and they
would all get to go home.

I was very anxious about keeping the children together, and as close to
me physically as possible.  Children are children wherever they are.

The twins wanted to walk around the camp-and, of course, that was very
dangerous.

An SS guard who might not know they were Mengele's twins could kill
them on the spot.  That was why I thought up games and classes.

This way, I knew where they were at all times.

I also distrusted Mengele.  I felt he could change his mind about the
twins at any time and have us all killed.  And so my strategy was to
have the twins maintain as low a profile as possible-and keep out of
Mengele's way.

The youngest children were not aware of the darker side of the man they
affectionately called

"Uncle Mengele."  They did not know about the surgeries of unspeakable
horror.  It is not that Mengele confined the more gruesome and painful
studies to the older children, but that they were too young to
comprehend the sinister experiments.

They saw only a cheerful, avuncular doctor who rewarded them with candy
if they behaved.  But the older twins, and the adults, such as the
twins' mothers and Jewish doctors who saw Mengele at work, recognized
his kindness as a deception-yet another of his perverse experiments,
whose aim was to test their mental endurance.  The fact that Mengele
could behave so nicely even as he inflicted pain, torture, and death
made him the most feared man at Auschwitz.

However, in performing his diabolical experiments on twins, Mengele
believed he was pursuing high-minded scientific goals.  Personal
ambition also played its role in propelling Mengele to exceed even Nazi
standards of cruelty, so that he stood out from other death-camp
doctors.  Driven by a need to reach the peak of his profession, he no
doubt believed that if he only worked hard enough, performed enough
experimental studies, tested a sufficient number of twins, then he
would be recognized as the great scientist he thought he was.

But despite his dedication and fanaticism, the mediocre student of
Gunzburg never possessed any real brilliance.  The tests,
questionnaires, and many of the experiments themselves appear to have
been the brainchild of Verschuer.  At his best, Josef Mengele was
earnest and efficient, an excellent "assistant," but even at his most
fiendish, he was not a man of ideas.  In Munich, in Frankfurt, and even
now at Auschwitz, he was merely methodical and perverse.  If there was
ever a "great" racial scientist, it was Otmar von Verschuer.

Mengele's fundamental narcissism, however, led him to try to make
himself into a first-rate scientist, as he had made himself elegant and
stylish.  Mengele never saw his personal limitations and the gap
between his real and imagined abilities, of course.  He donned genetic
theories and questionable racial dogma the way he put on white gloves
and a hat.  Obsessed with his own appearance, the vain young Beppo of
Gunzburg was devoting his life to a science whose aims-fostering a race
of "beautiful" people-mirrored his own personal obsession.

ALEX D KEL: I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself
believed he was doing serious medical work-not from the slipshod way he
went about it.  He was only exercising his power.

Mengele ran a butcher shop-major surgeries were performed without
anesthesia.  Once, I witnessed a stomach operation-Mengele was removing
pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthesia.

Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without
anesthesia.  It was horrifying.

Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was
given.

Nobody ever questioned him-why did this one die?  why did that one
perish?  The patients did not count.

He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a
madness on his part.

In this sham universe of scientific truths, half-truths, and outright
lies, the experiments administered on the children represented a
catalog of criminality and cruelty.  Blood would be transfused from one
twin to the other, and the results duly noted and compared.  Bizarre
psychological tests, designed to measure endurance, were continually
made.  For instance, a small child would be placed in isolation, in a
small, cage like room, with or without his twin.  The children would be
exposed to various stimuli and their reactions recorded.  There are
twins who recall they were targets of an insidious psychological
barrage, but years later were still too traumatized to conjure up the
details.  And finally, there were the surgeries, the horrible,
murderous operations.

Mengele would plunder a twin's body, sometimes removing organs and
limbs.  He injected the children with lethal germs, including typhus
and tuberculosis, to see how quickly they succumbed to the diseases.

Many became infected and died.  He also attempted to change the sex of
some twins.  Female twins were sterilized; males were castrated.

What was the point of these ghoulish experiments?  No one, neither the
child-victims nor the adult witnesses, ever really knew.  Mengele
constantly probed the children, trying to wrest from them secrets they
did not possess.

VERA BLAU: Mengele performed some very painful experiments on my
sister, Rachel.

She was very ill during her entire stay at the camp.

They would wheel her in and out of the operating room.  But she does
not remember what they did.

She remembers only the lights-the big red lights flashing down on her
as they were about to operate.  . .

Several twins believe that Mengele had pairs of twins mate.  There are
hushed testimonies to that effect.  Although all the twins deny
firsthand knowledge, and many insist it never happened, there were
rumors around the barracks that such perverse experiments were indeed
taking place.  No twin will elaborate on what he or she knew: Even in
the nightmare world of Auschwitz, there were taboos, and this was the
ultimate one.  That Mengele breached it is not unlikely, given the
awful scope of his experiments.  We will probably never know for
sure.

Unless, of course, one twin, haunted by the memory of the forcible
incestuous coupling, steps forward and testifies.

The final step in Mengele's scientific program was to kill the children
and have their organs analyzed.  Occasionally, though, if a twin seemed
to be an especially "interesting" specimen, Mengele skipped the usual
series of experiments and simply injected him or her with a shot of
phenol to the heart.  An autopsy would be performed, and various limbs
and organs sent to Verschuer's Berlin institute.

Mengele's mentor, in turn, subjected these to further scrutiny.

If Mengele's experiments seemed to each twin to become ever more
diabolical, that was only an illusion: The intended objective had
always been the death of the children.  What the twins who had arrived
in the spring and summer of 1944 did not know was that many other
groups had preceded them.  It was only a matter of time before their
turn came.

MOSHE OFFER: One day, my twin brother, Tibi, was taken away for some
special experiments.  Dr.  Mengele had always been more interested in
Tibi.  I am not sure why-perhaps because he was the older twin.

Mengele made several operations on Tibi.

One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed.  He could not walk
anymore.

Then they took out his sexual organs.

After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore.

I cannot tell you how I felt.  It is impossible to put into words how I
felt.

They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers-and
now, my twin.

three.

THE ANGEL OF DEATH.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN.

There was a yard at Auschwitz, and there we waited for the airplanes.

For the British.  For the Americans.  For the Russians.  For anyone who
could save us.

MENASH LORINCZI: When we spotted the planes, we would pray,

"Please God, bomb Auschwitz!  Even if you have to kill us in the
process, bomb the camp."

We were ready to die if it would mean the end of this horror.

But they never did.  We watched the planes fly over us, but none of
them ever dropped a single bomb on Auschwitz.  I could not understand
it-none of us could.

Every day, thousands of Hungarian Jews arrived on the trains.  We
watched them disembark.  We saw them being herded into the
crematoriums, which were working twenty-four hours a day.

TWINS' FATHER: The children would stand for hours just watching the
flames.

The crematoriums were located only one hundred meters away from the
twins' barracks.  There was just a small fence in between.

The twins could see the transports-the trains pulling into Birkenau.

They missed nothing that was going on at Auschwitz.

In front of the compound, there was a place where the Germans collected
the dead bodies.  There would be fifty, sixty, or a hundred corpses
piled one on top of the other.  These were then taken to the
crematoriums in little wheelbarrows.

But there were times the people were still alive.  And the children
could see that some of these "corpses" were still living.

All day, the twins observed Mengele motioning people to go to the right
and to the left.  They watched the masses of people going into the
crematoriums.

M NASH LORINCzI: And even though we were children, we understood.

By the summer of 1944, Mengele's twins were among the very few people
who had survived the selections at Auschwitz.  Hardly anyone now
arriving on the transports had the good fortune to be chosen for
enslavement in labor camps.  The war was now going progressively worse
for the Nazis, and they stepped up their efforts to destroy their
Jewish victims.  Russian bombers regularly flew over the concentration
camp, as did an occasional American plane.  Hitler's army was
surrounded by troops from both East and West, and there were reports of
massive German defeats.  With each new loss on the battlefront, the
Auschwitz commandants took their fury out on the Jewish prisoners,
herding them mercilessly into the gas chambers.

As Germany rushed to implement the Final Solution, more and more
transports rolled into Auschwitz.  Throughout that terrible summer,
convoys pulled into nearby Birkenau with unrelenting regularity,
delivering the final remnants of the Jews of Austria, Holland, Greece,
Italy, France, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and, of course, Hungary.

The Hungarian Jews were the last intact Jewish community in Eastern
Europe.  Although formally allied with the Nazis, the Hungarian
government had managed to shield its Jewish population for most of the
war.  But in 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and assigned Adolf
Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, to oversee the
deportation of the Jews to the death camps.  As if to make up for lost
time, the Nazis sought to destroy the Hungarian Jews with a
vengeance.

By the summer of 1944, nearly half a million of them had been deported
to Auschwitz.  In order to accommodate the accelerated extermination
process, four crematoriums functioned around the clock.

Mengele could be seen day and night at the head of the selection line,
greeting the influx of new arrivals.  Except for the twins, however,
Mengele's finger pointed in only one direction now: toward the gas
chambers.

PETER SOMOGYL: My family arrived from Hungary on one of the last
transports to Auschwitz-maybe the very last one.

We came from Pecs, a small town located several hundred kilometers from
Budapest.  We led a comfortable life before the war.  My father was a
representative for Ford Motor Company.  He ran a business selling
American cars, which were quite popular.

My older sister, my twin brother, and I had a nanny.  All three of us
attended a Jewish elementary school.  Our family was very religious.

There was a flourishing Jewish community in Pecs in those days.

Life was fine until 1944.  The Nazis came to Pecs in March of that
year, and everything changed.  One anti-Semitic decree after another
was issued.  First, we had to wear a yellow Star of David.  Then, we
were no longer allowed to attend school.

In April, all the Jews of Pecs were rounded up and placed in a
ghetto.

We lived in this ghetto for about two months.  Although it was very
crowded, life was still not too bad.  I can even remember a Boy Scout
troop being formed inside the ghetto.  We played regular games of
soccer.

No one knew what was going on, what was going to happen.  But many
people-including my mother-suspected and feared the worst.

One day, the Nazis told us we were going to move.  We would be
"relocated "somewhere in Austria."  They were very vague.  And they
never, ever mentioned Poland-and certainly not Auschwitz.

We were taken out of the ghetto and placed in a large stable-a place
where before the war our horses had been kept.  The Germans also
brought trainloads of jews from other neighboring villages, and crammed
them with us in this stable.

The first week in July, all the Jews were marched down to the train
station and placed in cattle cars.  We were packed in so tightly we
could hardly breathe.

It took nearly four days to get to Auschwitz.  Since this was the
summer, it was extremely hot inside our car.  We were given no food, no
water.  I remember a little boy crying incessantly for water.

We arrived at Auschwitz on July 9, 1944.  It was early in the evening,
and when we stepped out of the cattle cars, we could see the chimneys,
with very, very high flames leaping out from them.

"What is this?"  my brother and I asked our mother.

"Oh, it's probably just a big factory," she told us.

Unirmed guards walked up and down the selection line asking for
twins.

They asked for them both in German and Hungarian.

But it wasn't until the third time the guards asked that my mother
admitted we were twins.  The first two times, she kept silent.  She
didn't know what it meant, whether it was good or bad.  And because my
brother and I didn't look alike at all, it was easy for her to pretend
we were not twins.

My brother and I were quickly plucked out of the line.  It was the last
time I ever saw my mother or my sister.

We were placed in an ambulance, and whisked off to the twins'
barracks.

There, we were greeted by Zyl Spiegel, who told us he was the

"Twins' Father," in charge of all the boy twins.

We didn't know what had happened to our mother, and so we asked him
when we could see her.  He hedged.  He didn't want to tell us yet what
had happened, what was probably happening that very moment-that she had
gone up in the flames.

Mengele's passion for selecting victims for the gas chambers, his cool
efficiency and relish for the job, would earn him the sobriquet "the
Angel of Death."  It is unclear bow the dandy from Gunzburg first
acquired the title.  The preponderance of evidence suggests he got the
nickname after the war, as the public gained awareness of his heinous
deeds.  Was it coined by an anguished survivor, haunted by the memory
of Mengele's tender smile and ruthless acts?  Or was it simply the
product of some clever headline writer, invented when news of the
Auschwitz doctor's crimes first suit aced Whoever the author was, no
Torah scholar or Hassidic grand rebbe, no mystic of the Cabala or
Talmudic sage, could have envisioned a more perfect earthly incarnation
of the evil spirit the Bible calls the Malach Hamavet than Dr.  Josef
Mengele of Auschwitz.

The Angel of Death is a figure who appears throughout the Old
Testament.  By chilling coincidence, the biblical lore even states he
assumed the form of a physician, one, moreover, "of excellent
repute."

The ancient spiritual leader of Bratislava, Rabbi Nahman, once observed
that "it was difficult for the Angel of Death to slay everyone, so He
found doctors to assist him."  Terrifying, utterly without mercy or
compassion, the Angel of Death visited the earth clothed in a doctor's
garb and cut an endless swath of destruction.  "Even if the Almighty
were to order me back upon earth to live my life all over again, I
would refuse because of the horror of the Angel of Death," said Rabbi
Nahman-a view that many of Mengele's victims would doubtless have
shared.

The bizarre, almost poetic title stuck because it captured so well the
contradictions in Mengele's character.  Like the spirit Malach Hamavet,
Mengele was a master destroyer, a Satanic figure brimming with evil and
without regard for the value of a human life.  But also like his
namesake, Mengele was "angelic" in appearance and demeanor, able to
charm, to woo, to captivate, to trick and seduce, everyone he met, most
especially young children.

PETER SOMOGYL: When we first met Dr.  Mengele, my brother and I noticed
he was whistling.  Both of us had studied classical music in Hungary,
and we recognized the tune as a work of Mozart.  We told this to
Mengele.

He was absolutely delighted.  It made for an instant rapport.  We could
also speak German fluently, and Mengele seemed very pleased with that,
as well.

We became Mengele's special proteges.  He nicknamed us "the members of
the intelligentsia."

Mengele related to the twins on diflerent levels.  With my brother and
me, he liked to discuss music.  We had long talks with him about
culture.  Perhaps because of this, we were not afraid of the
experiments-or of him.

Once or twice, he took us to his office.  There, he measured us,
weighed us.  He checked the size of our heads, of our eyes.  He did
this very gently.

I remember thinking Mengele was rather a nice man.

The massive number of Hungarian transports sent many more guinea pigs
Mengele's way.  Although the twins were from the start the focus of
Mengele's work at Auschwitz, like every other SS doctor there he had
his share of routine duties, such as signing death certificates and
making sure outbreaks of contagious maladies like TB and cholera did
not get out of hand.

Occasionally, to relieve the tedium, Mengele would demand a show of the
new arrivals.  One especially hot July day, a group of Hungarian rabbis
descended from the cattle car.  Despite the stifling heat, they were
still wearing their traditional garb long black coats, black woolen
trousers, and fur hats.  Mengele looked them up and down with contempt,
then decided to amuse himself before motioning them to the gas
chambers.  First, he ordered the rabbis to step out of the selection
line and sing.  The holy men obeyed without a word of protest.  Then,
Mengele commanded them to dance.  He wanted them to raise their arms and
their voices toward the God who would not save them, no matter how loud
their prayers.

And so the Hungarian rabbis began to dance, slowly, ponderously, under
the sweltering sun of Auschwitz.  They held their heads high,
determined to preserve their dignity.  With their eyes fixed to the
sky, the rabbis chanted the

"Kol Nidre," the mournful hymn of atonement, while Josef Mengele
listened, unrepentant.

Mengele's zeal for his work clearly impressed his superiors, who
showered him with accolades that terrible summer.  He was now at the
height of his powers.  As chief doctor of Birkenau, the huge
extermination center next to Auschwitz, he presided over a doomed
population of Gypsies, twins, and several thousand female inmates.

Although there were Nazis at Auschwitz who held higher ranks, none was
as hated, or as feared, as Dr.  Josef Mengele.

In the terrible summer of 1944, Birkenau was also crammed with hordes
of newly arrived Hungarian women.  Because of the stepped up number of
transports, even Nazi efficiency was proving inadequate to the task of
slaughtering all the Jews who kept arriving.  Each day, hundreds of
Hungarian women were herded into Birkenau.  There was simply no time to
put these women through the normal selection process as they got off
the trains, or even to assign them a number, and Mengele was obliged to
perform the selections later, inside the women's camp.

Mengele was frequently accompanied during these inspections by a
beautiful young German guard, Irma Grese.  The

"Blond Angel," as she was called, and the elegant Dr.  Mengele made a
splendid couple.  Both were renowned around the camp for their beauty
and sadism.  Only eighteen, Irma loved to parade in her finery-clothes
looted from the trunks of Jewish women.  She gloated over the inmates
who were forced by circumstance to be at her mercy.  She cracked her
leather whip on the helpless women like some Hollywood parody of a
female SS guard.  To Mengele, of course, she was utterly deferential.

The women of Birkenau both feared and admired Mengele.  Much as they
loathed to admit it, several of his female victims actually found him
attractive.  As he inspected them, some intuitively resorted to
preening gestures of a time gone by, patting what was left of their
hair, straightening their tattered camp uniforms, and attempting a
smile.

Clearly, many of these poor women were merely using their sexuality in
a desperate effort to save themselves.  But despite their physical
frailty and emotional anguish, some were not immune to Mengele's sexual
magnetism.

Mengele seemed as at ease with the adult women of Birkenau as he was
with the twins, and all the more confident of his own attractiveness.

To this day, survivors note the extreme care he took with his
appearance-his uniform, exquisitely tailored and perfectly pressed; his
cap, so carefully angled on the head; and his white gloves, which he
wore even while making selections.  Indeed, to these forlorn women,
destined to die, Mengele seemed almost a romantic figure.

Back in Gunzburg, he had exuded charisma as he strode through town with
his brisk, energetic walk and the slight smile that never left his
face.  There, he could have his pick of all the town belles.

And the same was grotesquely true in the concentration camp.  Here,,
too, Beppo Mengele could select any woman he pleased-as his next
victim.

As part of the selections Mengele conducted inside Birkenau, women were
required to undress and parade naked in front of him.

This enabled him to judge whether they were fit to live just a little
bit longer.  Much as he was able to convince the young twins to like
and trust him, Mengele intuitively knew the secret of making these
female inmates feel at ease.  Several of the women on parade would
confide in him, admitting, in response to his questioning, that they
were not feeling well, or suffered from some chronic ailment.  What
these women did not realize was that by trusting the handsome young
doctor, and revealing to him their weaknesses and maladies, they were
only hastening their own deaths.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: When Mengele made the selections inside Birkenau, the
women were not sent immediately to the gas chambers.  They were first
taken to another compound, not far from the twins' barracks.

These poor women knew they were going to be killed, and so they were
constantly shouting and crying.

I would see big open trucks filled with naked women who were obviously
destined for the gas chambers.

It was an awful, awful sight.

Once in a while, Mengele seemed to be drawn physically to one of the
Jewish inmates, in spite of the efforts of their Nazi captors to strip
them of their beauty.  Shortly after arriving at Auschwitz, women were
herded into Hitler's version of a "beauty parlor," where their heads
were shaved.  The women were then given either a regulation striped
uniform or absurd, ill-fitting rags to wear.  Their shoes were usually
too large or too small, often consisting of a "pair" of one flat
slipper and one high heel.  The effect was to make the women look
ridiculous and thoroughly un alluring to everyone-including their Aryan
guards.

Occasionally, the Nazi system failed, and a woman radiated beauty, her
shapeless garments and shorn hair notwithstanding.  Mengele encountered
such a woman in lbi Hillman.  Tall, blond, and statuesque,
fifteen-year-old Ibi had been the pride of her small village in
Transylvania.  When Ibi removed her uniform in the course of an
"inspection," Mengele found himself staring at her, transfixed.  The
other female inmates, and even his own assistants, watched him, aware
of his attraction to the young Jewish woman.  Any other SS officer
would have simply made her his mistress.  But Mengele evidently could
not and would not concede feeling an attraction toward a Jew.  In a
loud voice, he dispatched Ibi to the infamous Block Ten, where the
Nazis were performing sinister gynecological experiments.  Few women
survived Block Ten.

A few weeks later, Ibi was spotted by some inmates wandering by
herself, in a daze.  They hardly recognized her.  The beautiful young
girl looked like a shriveled old woman.  Her slender limbs were now
swollen and disfigured, while her stomach was bloated from the numerous
surgeries that had been performed on her.  Sickly and grotesque, Ibi
Hillman no longer held any possible attraction-for Dr.  Mengele or any
other male.

Mengele also seemed to take a perverse pleasure in exterminating women
who were pregnant.  "This is not a maternity ward," he replied easily,
when asked why these women were sometimes automatically sent to die.

Mengele even boasted he was being "humanitarian In having these women
killed.  Auschwitz, he would point out, had no facilities to take care
of newborn children.  But Mengele fluctuated erratically in his
policy.

Some weeks, he issued orders that pregnant women were to be kept alive
and given every consideration.  Other weeks, he ordered them killed
immediately.  At times, Mengele permitted a woman to deliver her baby,
but then he promptly dispatched mother and infant to the gas
chambers.

Even by Auschwitz standards, Mengele's obsessive cruelty to pregnant
women stood out.  When he first met an expectant inmate, Mengele liked
to quiz her at length about her condition.  He asked dozens of precise,
detailed questions that allowed him to assume the protective coloration
of a concerned physician.  But the questions were often more personal
than scientific, more voyeuristic than impartial.  When did she become
pregnant, he wanted to know, before or after arriving at Auschwitz?  By
whom?  In what circumstances was the child conceived?  In posing the
questions, Mengele would try to maintain his usual detachment, but the
intensity of his curiosity seemed odd both to the unfortunate women he
addressed and to the assistants who overheard such exchanges.

Pregnancy, after all, was an everyday occurrence.  And unlike twins,
triplets, dwarfs, or giants, pregnant women could hardly be deemed a
scientific phenomenon.

MAGDA SPIEGEL: Pregnant women were always coming to Mengele's office.

He wanted to be present at the birth of their children-he wanted to be
present during each and every birth at Auschwitz.

There were red-brick ovens in the middle of the barracks.  The women
were forced to give birth on these ovens: That was where Mengele
"delivered" the babies.  These poor women were given nothing, no
pillows, no blankets.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: If a woman was pregnant, or even if Mengele simply
thought she was pregnant, he sent her immediately to the gas
chambers.

My aunt, my mother's sister, was a bit overweight.  She had a
stomach.

Mengele was convinced she was pregnant, and so he sent her to be
gassed.

Mengele's Jewish assistants, like Dr.  Gisella Perl, took to performing
abortions just to save the lives of women who faced automatic death if
their pregnancies were discovered.  In an effort to rescue as many of
these women as possible, Perl secretly performed crude abortions.  When
a pregnancy was too advanced, she would deliver the baby, then kill it
with an injection of phenol, telling the mother her baby had been born
dead.

Perl, who worked closely with Mengele, came to know him well and to
despise him.  In I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, a searing account of her
experiences at the concentration camp written shortly after the war,
Perl described Mengele as a supreme sadist who lorded his power over
the frailest subjects of Auschwitz's kingdom of Death: the pregnant
women and their newborn children, the deformed hunchbacks and freakish
giants, the dwarfs and midgets.  Mengele was "so proud of his index
finger which could distribute life or death at will, of his attractive,
elegant physique .  . . [of his sham-medical profession."  Perl wrote
with emotion.  The people who caught Mengele's eye, she pointed out,
were life's most vulnerable.

As chief doctor of Birkenau, Mengele was also in charge of the Gypsy
camp.  Located near the twins' barracks, it was unique in the death
camp, where the rule was to separate family members the moment they
arrived.  The Gypsies were allowed to stay together, perhaps because
they were faithful Christians, despite their inferior racial stock.

It was their one privilege.

Several thousand Gypsies were crowded into one encampment, whose
borders were grimly defined by the crematoriums.  At any time of the
day or night, they could look up and see the blood-red smoke pouring
out of the chimneys, or the Sonderkommandos pushing streams of people
to their deaths.  Because of the overcrowding, insufficient food, and
poor sanitary conditions, epidemics ravaged the Gypsy population.

The wretched conditions notwithstanding, the Gypsies alone among the
inmates of the concentration camp had the comfort of being with their
loved ones.  Their encampment looked like a vast playground.  In an
open area, dark-haired, dark-eyed men and women with traces of their
former beauty sat watching their children at play.

The youngsters ran around as if they were still in their own camps in
the crossroads of Europe.  It was an ongoing carnival, right in the
middle of Auschwitz.  The adults exchanged stories, sang songs, even
danced.  Some of the old melodies were so haunting that even the SS
guards making their rounds would stop to listen.  The music seemed to
conjure up another life, far from Auschwitz and the war.

Mengele, the benevolent despot of this enclave, passed through the camp
every day on the way to his laboratories.  He appeared fond of these
children, too, and they liked him in return, just like the twins in the
compound next door.  When Mengele came to see them, they crowded around
him, extending their hands for candy, daring to reach for his bulging
pockets that promised chocolates and other treats.  "Uncle Mengele!

Uncle Mengele!"  they cried out.  And Mengele would pat the children's
heads and, reaching into his pockets, smilingly retrieve a bonbon or
two.  At the same time, he kept his eye out for potential experimental
subjects.  Tests were being conducted on several pairs of Gypsy twins,
and Mengele was always watchful for more.

There was one little boy of exceptional beauty who was Mengele's
favorite companion as he made his daily rounds at the Gypsy camp.

What a striking pair they made-the tall, graceful doctor and the dark,
delicate child who barely came up to his knee.  Mengele had him dressed
all in white, so that the boy looked strangely regal.  Sometimes he
would ask the little boy to perform a jig or sing a melody.  Afterward,
Mengele would lean over and hug him, and ply him with chocolates and
candies.

Mengele knew that conditions in the Gypsy camp were deteriorating
quickly and that the death rate was mounting.  He also knew why the
Gypsies' situation was so abysmal: The Nazi hierarchy in Berlin had
decided to exterminate them.  Although Berlin kept wavering, it was
only a matter of time before the inhabitants of the camp were to be put
to death.

As their fate was being decided, the Gypsies formed little
orchestras.

They played tinny waltzes, lively mazurkas, touching ballads and
operettas.  Little girls danced to the music.  The Gypsies always
played when Mengele passed through because they knew how much he loved
music.

The summer of 1944 dragged on.  They were starving to death!

Gypsy babies died, emaciated, after only a few days.  There was no
running water.  Still, they danced.  They did not realize it was a
dance of death.  Only Mengele knew.

The order finally came down from Berlin on August 2, 1944.  At seven
o'clock that evening, the Gypsy camp was sealed shut.

MENA5HE L0RINGzI: We heard a terrible cry.  The Gypsies knew they were
going to be put to death, and they cried all night.

They had been at Auschwitz a long time.  They had seen the Jews
arriving at the ramps, had watched the selections where old people and
children went to the gas chambers.  And so they cried.

And when the Gypsies cried, all the twins heard them.

And even though I was a child, only nine or ten years old, I
understood.

Toward the end of that terrible night, when nearly all the Gypsies had
been slaughtered, Mengele went to get the boy who had been his little
mascot.  Hand in hand, they walked around the camp, as they had done
for so many months.  Then Mengele took the child to the gas chamber and
showed him the way inside.  He obediently climbed in.

Efficient as ever, Mengele did not forget the sets of Gypsy twins on
whom experiments were being conducted.  They were gassed with the rest
of the Gypsies, but he had the letter X marked on their chests so they
would not be cremated.  The corpses were duly delivered to his
pathology laboratory, where his assistant, Dr.  Nyiszli, performed
analyses of them as ordered.  His work complete, Nyiszli turned over
his reports to Mengele.  That same night, the two sat for hours calmly
discussing the findings.

A few weeks later, in September, Mengele's wife, Irene, arrived.

It was her second trip to the death camp.  She had been there the
previous year as well, and had brought along little Rolf.  This time,
she left the child behind in Germany.

Irene and Josef had spent little time together since their marriage
four years earlier.  Although Mengele's wife was certainly aware of
what was happening at Auschwitz, her diary suggests she did not let it
mar her reunion with her husband.  The couple went swimming and enjoyed
outings in nearby fields, where they picked berries.  Irene's Auschwitz
holiday was interrupted when she contracted typhoid fever and had to be
hospitalized.  After receiving every care, she became well enough to
travel back to Germany with Josef.  In an entry she made after the
trip, she observed that her darling husband had seemed a bit
depressed.

She did not elaborate.  But the course of the war-as well as his
activities in the camps may well have been weighing on Mengele.  On a
visit made to the Berlin home of Professor Verschuer at about this
time, Mengele appeared dour when asked how Auschwitz was.  "Simply
horrible," he replied.

In those final months of the war, Mengele made more selections than
ever.  To observers, he acted like a man possessed, as though he was
driven by the notion that if he worked hard enough, performed enough
experiments, tested a sufficient number of twins, he might still make
some important scientific discovery.

One of Mengele's greatest fears was that the hated

"Bolsheviks" would get their hands on his research material, so
painstakingly collected over the last couple of years.  One day, he
invited Dr.  Ellanngens, a non-Jewish physician who was a political
prisoner, to review the reports he had compiled.  As Lingens leafed
through the thick sheaves of papers, charts, and graphs, Mengele
bitterly observed,

"Isn't it a pity all this work will fall into the hands of the
Bolsheviks?"

And, indeed, that fall Russian troops were reported to be rapidly
approaching.  As they drew nearer and confusion at the camp mounted,
the twins' protected status became increasingly imperiled.

PETER SOMOGYL: One day, a new doctor came around to inspect the
twins.

His name was Dr.  Thilo.  He made a selection, which had never been
done on us.  He selected all the male twins-we were all to be sent to
the gas chambers.  Every twin's number was marked down as destined for
the crematorium.

Our barracks were sealed.  All the doors were boarded up.  We were not
allowed to leave.

ALEX DEKEL: It was November when I was sent into the barracks with the
other children.  I was thirteen at the time, and I knew exactly what
was going on.  I knew everyone was selected to go to the gas
chambers.

You were selected in the afternoon, and by midnight you were picked up
and sent to the gas chamber.

Our barracks had small windows-they were four feet, five feet, off the
ground.  I jumped up to one of those small windows.  It was impossible
to reach, but I jumped.  Somehow I reached it, and I just hung there,
barely grasping the windowsill with my fingers.  Then, I do not know
how, I managed to jump outside.  I landed in the snow and saw a
building in front of me.  I climbed through the window and found myself
in a toilet.  Outside, I heard truck engines.  And so I jumped down
into the toilet.  I heard a German guard enter.  He took a flashlight,
shined it around the room, but he didn't see me.  I stayed there all
night, hidden inside the toilet.

TWINS' FATHER: The children were very upset, very frightened.  They
knew what was going to happen to them.  They knew the end was
coming-that the Nazis were planning to kill them.

PETER SOMOGYL: I remember trying to plot ways to get revenge.  I had a
little pocketknife-we all did, to cut our bread in the morning.  The
Nazis never thought there was any danger in giving little children
pocket knives.

I remember sharpening my knife like a fanatic.  I knew we would be
taken to the gas chambers in trucks, with several SS guards inside to
watch over us.

Although I was only eleven years old, I remember this very distinctly,
wanting to kill a Nazi.  I said to myself

"Before I go, I am taking at least one SS man with me."

TWINS' FATHER: I don't know how I got the authority, but somehow I was
able to leave the barracks.

I ran toward Mengele's office.  I ran even though it was very dangerous
to run through the camp, because the SS shot anyone who moved too
quickly.  But I knew time was of the essence.

I told the guards outside Mengele's office that I wanted to speak with
him.  This was a bit like saying you wanted to speak with God.

To this day, I don't know why they didn't shoot me for that request,
either.  But somehow, I was allowed in to see Mengele.  I told him
about Thilo's order to kill all the twins.

Mengele was quite upset.  He immediately went to reverse the order, and
said the children should be kept alive.

PETER SOMOGYL; The Nazis came and opened up the doors to our
barracks.

To our surprise, we were told we could go outside.

When Twins' Father returned a bit later, we kept asking him,

"What happened?  Why didn't we die?"

He told us simply that Mengele had called off the selection.

Later that fall, the twins were alarmed to hear they were being moved
into the deserted Gypsy barracks.  No explanation was given for the
change.  The children were afraid they had been marked again for
extermination.  Rumors spread through their barracks, despite the fact
that Mengele was proceeding with his tests and experiments as
diligently as before.  Even with the end closing in on him, even as
Hitler, his generals, and his professors brought Germany to ruin with
their notions of a superior race, Mengele still hoped to make some
great scientific discovery that would validate them all, save the
crumbling Third Reich-and his own disintegrating dreams.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I still remember when they moved us into the Gypsy
camp.  It was very cold-below zero-and it was snowing.

MENASHE LORINCZI: We thought it was the end of us.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: They made us stand outside because a prisoner was
missing.  We stood for hours in the cold, in the snow, until they found
this prisoner.

But as a result, my sister Ruthie got severe frostbite.  Her feet were
frozen.  She had to have an operation, and they removed some of her
toes.

She could not walk after that.

Back home, in Hungary, Ruthie had always been the livelier twin.

She had loved to dance.

Ruthie kept asking my mother if we would ever go home, and if she would
ever dance again.

That was her main concern-whether she would dance again.

4.

THE ANGEL VANISHES.

For the inmates of Auschwitz, December 31, 1944, marked the long
awaited time of hope and celebration.  The camp was quiet that New
Year's Eve.

Many of the SS guards and commandants were no longer there, having fled
to avoid being captured.  The Russian Army was now just a few
kilometers away.

At previous New Year's festivities, bedraggled inmates of the death
camp orchestra had played through the night for the Nazis.  Prisoners
would lie awake listening to the drunken revelry.  But this year, the
only music to be heard was the soft whir of Russian planes circling
overhead.  Air-raid sirens sounded intermittently, plaintive and
insistent.

A furtive party was held in Dr.  Mengele's infirmary by a group of
nurses and doctors who were also prisoners.  The celebrants traded news
about the fall of Berlin and the imminent Russian arrival; they toasted
the future by clinking cups of soup.

Auschwitz was no longer the formidable death camp it had been.

Those Nazis who remained on duty through New Year's were busy trying to
cover their tracks.  They scurried around destroying documents and
photographs, attempting to obliterate any evidence that would reveal
the enormity of their crimes.  Many of the crematoriums had already
been dismantled, the culmination of a process undertaken in November
and December on direct orders from the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin.

Several of the warehouses containing the personal belongings of the
Jews had been emptied of their goods.  Between December and January,
for instance, 514,843 articles of men's, women's, and children's
clothing were shipped out, according to an official Nazi report.

But the camp where four million people had passed through-of whom only
sixty thousand survived-had more evidence than even the Nazis' able
hands could destroy.  Entire storerooms remained intact, crammed from
floor to ceiling with the belongings of the millions.

One morning in late December, Mengele had marched into his laboratory
and announced it was being moved to another crematorium.

The equipment was carefully packed away and transported to the one
crematorium that was still operational.  The German Army was in
shambles and the Russians just weeks away from storming the camp, yet
Mengele ordered his assistants to set up the dissecting tables exactly
as before, in preparation for more "work."

Although Mengele was maintaining his usual studied nonchalance to the
last, he was secretly planning his own escape.  But unlike the other
camp doctors, who destroyed their work, Mengele didn't want the results
from a single experiment to be destroyed, or worse, to fall into the
hands of the despised Russians.  Mengele apparently took steps to
safeguard his work.  Key slides and specimens were carefully packed and
sent to Gunzburg for safekeeping.  He could only hope that Professor
Verschuer in Berlin-Dahlem would find some way to preserve the hundreds
of documents, reports, tissue samples, and organs he had sent him over
the last eighteen months.

Late one night, sometime in the middle of January-no one is certain
exactly when-the Angel of Death vanished.  He had betrayed no hint he
would be leaving, even as he visited the twins and inspected the
surviving women of Birkenau for what he knew would be the last time.

One prisoner did notice him putting boxloads of documents intO a
waiting car.  He left the camp so stealthily that for days even some of
his assistants failed to realize Mengele was gone.  He was one of the
last SS doctors to leave Auschwitz.

The remaining SS command was torn between a desire to destroy all
remaining evidence, which would take time, and the more primitive
mandate of Sauve qui peut-getting away while they still could.  In just
a few days, the SS managed to blow up the most damning evidence of all:
the crematoriums that were still standing.  Explosions ripped the ovens
that had consumed so many millions, until all that was left of them
were heaps of ashes and piles of smoking rubble.  The Nazis also set
fire to the

"Kanada," the storage room filled with so many treasures that the
inmates had named it after that faraway country whose very name
conjured up visions of wealth.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: The whole camp was burning.

The Germans placed explosives under the barracks and storerooms.

They were setting fire to different parts of the camp.

We thought the Germans were going to burn us alive.  We ran out of our
barracks.  The sky was red with flames.  It looked like an inferno It
was a terrible period.  The Germans were leaving the camp, and taking
with them anyone who was able to go.

But my sister, Ruthie, couldn't walk.  She was very sick.

My mother decided then and there we were going to leave the camp.

She got a wheelbarrow-God knows from where-and lined it with blankets
and pillows.  She stuck Ruthie in the wheelbarrow, took me by the hand,
and started walking.  She was prepared to wheel Ruthie out of
Auschwitz.

But a woman saw the three of us walking together and told my mother,
"Are you crazy?  Where are you going to go with your small children?"

She told her to go back to the barracks and stay there.

My mother went to some of the storerooms and grabbed things for us.

She took sweaters-coats-blankets-from among the beautiful items the
Jews had brought.  The Nazis had kept them in excellent order.

Eager to avoid the oncoming Russians, any guards still left at the camp
had rounded up most of the remaining adult prisoners and marched them
off into the frigid Polish winter to destinations unknown.

Many of the twins were forced to join this Death March, as it later
came to be called.  With defeat finally imminent, the Nazi guards were
even more brutal toward the enfeebled veterans of the concentration
camp than ever before.

VERA BLAU: Anyone who stopped was shot instantly.

My sister, Rachel, kept saying she couldn't go on, that she had no
strength to walk anymore.  And so I decided to drag her along.  I
grabbed her by her coat and dragged her through the snow.

For four days, we walked in the snow.  It was extremely cold.  Once, we
were given hot water to drink.  I spilled the hot water, and it fell
into my shoe.  It was so cold, my foot got frozen.

LEAH STERN: The Nazis gave us neither food nor drink during this
march.

We were so thirsty, we wanted to swallow some of the snow.  But the
Germans wouldn't even let us do that.

The snow came to our knees.  My sister, Hedvah, and I were wearing very
thin clothes.  We huddled under a blanket as we trudged through the
snow.  I was so weak, I kept wanting to stop, but my twin wouldn't let
me.

She decided we had to lighten our load to make walking easier.

First, we threw away the blanket.  We even tossed out some bread we had
taken with us.  For weeks prior to leaving Auschwitz, we'd been saving
this bread.  But even those little crusts of stale bread were proving
to be too heavy for us to carry.

When it looked like I was going to collapse.  Hedvah hoisted me on her
shoulder and carried me.  She saved my life.

ALEX DEKEL: We were forced to march in the freezing cold from Poland,
through Czechoslovakia, to Austria and the Mauthausen concentration
camp.

Every step I walked, I would sink to my knees and pray to God to kill
me.  I would get up, walk, and fall again, and again ask for death.

ZYL THE SAILOR: We started the Death March with about twenty thousand
people.  After two or three weeks, we arrived at the Mauthausen
concentration camp with three thousand people-maybe only two
thousand.

On this march, the Nazis treated us worse than animals.  They did
whatever they wanted with us.

I recall marching across big fields, and hearing shooting.  To this
day, I can still hear the sound of these gun shots.  Since that time, I
have fought in many wars, and I have heard many different kinds of
shootings, but I still remember this shooting more clearly than any
other.

We kept marching and hearing these shots in the background.  We came to
a big river between two hills, and we were told to run.  And so we
ran.

There was only one soldier, with only one machine gun, and he was
shooting at us as we ran.

And today, I live with this memory, and I am ashamed.  I ask myself how
could we have been so stupid?  Because today I realize there was only
one SS man doing the shooting, and hundreds-maybe thousands-of people
who were running, terrified of this one, solitary SS man.

The twins who evaded the Death March remained at the largely deserted
concentration camp.  There was neither food nor water.  With no guards
in sight, those still at Auschwitz plundered any storerooms still left
standing.  Hoping that the rumors the Russians were on their way were
true, Mengele's children waited to be rescued.

PETER SOMOGYL: We were terrified the Nazis would come back.  Even
without German soldiers, there was no sense of security.

We were very hungry.  There was no food, no food at all.

One morning, I decided to go out and hunt for food.  I walked around
the deserted camp.  But all I found was a big warehouse filled with
cases of bottled water.  And so I picked up some bottles and brought
them back to the twins.

Several of the male twins were together, and our Twins' Father was
still with us, watching over us.  He wanted to leave immediately and go
east.  He, too, was afraid the Nazis would return and take us
prisoner-and we'd have no second chance.

Then one day we looked up to see the first Russian troops.  . .

On January 27, 1945, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Russian
soldiers marched into Auschwitz.  They found the twins huddled inside
one of the barracks.  They were cold and hungry.  Many were suffering
from typhoid fever and dysentery.  Their frail, emaciated bodies still
bore needle marks from the blood tests and injections that had been
administered up to the end.

But they were alive!  Mengele's twins were among the only children to
have survived Auschwitz.

The first thing the Russians did was to distribute clothing and
blankets.  The twins were given the camp's striped uniforms, which they
had never had to wear before.  The jackets and trousers were so big the
children had to stuff layer after layer of clothing to keep them from
falling off.

That night, there was a big party to celebrate the liberation.  The
emaciated women of Birkenau discovered long-lost sources of energy
within their frail bodies.  In their joy, they danced all night with
the Russian soldiers.  Mengele's twins stood by happily, watching the
adult goings-On.

The next day, the dazed children were marched out of the camp.

The scene was captured by Russian cameramen as part of a propaganda
film that would show the world how the Russian Army had rescued Jewish
children from Fascist hands.  The twins had to roll up their sleeves
and show their tatooed numbers for close-up shots.  They were led out
of Auschwitz several times, until the director was satisfied the
liberation scene looked sufficiently authentic.

As they passed through the gates of Auschwitz, twins clutched each
other tightly.  Amid the euphoria of the liberation was the aching
sadness felt by all the children, knowing they were leaving Auschwitz
without the families with whom they had arrived.  The camp lay behind
them like a vast cemetery, filled with the unmarked graves of their
loved ones.

Journalists descended on Auschwitz in the immediate aftermath of the
liberation, demanding to get the story that had eluded them for so many
years: the story of the Nazis' systematic slaughter of millions of Jews
in one cold and forsaken corner of Poland.  Menashe Lorinczi, a twin
who had worked as Mengele's messenger boy, volunteered to be their tour
guide.  Menashe took both reporters and Russian soldiers through the
maze of buildings and barracks that made up AuschwitzBirkenau, pointing
out the various facilities.  To his pride and delight, he became an
instant hero, the first child survivor to be interviewed and quoted in
newspapers around the world.

MENgele LoRINGzI: Right after talking with the journalists and touring
Auschwitz with them, I collapsed.  The Russians put me in an infirmary
they had set up at the camp.

I lay in bed for months, suffering from one illness after the other.

My teeth fell out.  I developed a lung infection, then tuberculosis.

Months after the liberation of Auschwitz, I was still sick, still in
the concentration camp, with my twin sister at my side.

Some of the twins who were well and did not require hospitalization
were bundled out of Auschwitz and taken to a large monastery in the
Polish city of Katowice.  There, for the first time in years, they were
given plenty of food, clothing, and even toys.  Best of all, they were
free to roam the city.  There were joyful rides on the streetcar, where
they merely had to show the tattooed number on their arm for the
driver to let them on without exacting a fare.  At the monastery, the
only discipline the nuns imposed on the children was requiring them to
come back in time for meals, which were served promptly three times a
day.

EVA MOZES: I will never forget that monastery.  The first night, Miriam
and I were put in a beautiful room with a large bed, covered by the
whitest sheets I had ever seen.  The room was filled with toys.  I had
no idea what to do with all those toys.  I felt so filthy and dirty-no
one had bothered to give us a bath, you see.  I had lice crawling all
over me.

And so, that first night, I removed the sheet from the bed and fell
asleep on the bare mattress.

Zyl Spiegel, who at thirty was one of the oldest of Mengele's twins,
the one they had lovingly called

"Twins' Father," was reminded of a promise he had made during the dark
days of the mass exterminations.

He had sworn to take all the boys home.

TWINS' FATHER: The twins were very excited.  They were like little bees
buzzing around me.  They kept saying,

"You promised you would take us home, Twins' Father.  You promised." It
was true-I had promised this.

But it had only been to make them happy.  I had never believed it
myself One of the older prisoners wanted me to run away with him.

"We're free-let's get out of here together," he kept telling me.  But I
decided that I had to take the twins home.  I felt an obligation toward
them.

I left Auschwitz on January 28, 1945, with thirty-six children in
tow.

I made a list of all their names, their ages, and where they were
from.

Before we started the journey, I gathered the children for a lecture.

I laid down the rules, just as if they were troops I might have
commanded in former years in the Czech Army.  I told them they had to
stick together and keep up with me, or else I couldn't be responsible
for them.

PETER SOMOGYL: We begged Twins' Father to take us with him because we
were so fearful of remaining at Auschwitz.  We knew we were free, but
we were constantly afraid the Nazis would somehow make their way back
to the camp.

"What if the Germans return and kill us?"  we kept wondering.

Even with the Russian Army there, feeding us, taking care of us, we
still worried about the Germans.

With Twins' Father leading the way, we left Auschwitz and started
marching east, toward Krakow.

It was bitter cold.  My twin brother and I carried these little
knapsacks I had sewn from a blanket.  In mine, I carried all my worldly
belongings: a small crust of bread and some of the bottles of water I
had found in the deserted storeroom.  When I was "packing" to leave
Auschwitz, I found I had nothing to take with me-no clothes, no food
other than the little piece of bread-so I stuck these bottles of water
in my knapsack.  I figured they might come in handy.

I remember, as we walked, feeling icicles in my pants and legs.  It was
so cold that the bottles had exploded, and the water had frozen around
my body.

We walked and walked-but we didn't allow ourselves to stop.  We were
very afraid of turning back.  And even though we were freezing, Twins'
Father would tell us to keep going.

TWINS' FATHER: It took us three days just to get to Krakow.  On the
way, we passed soup kitchens set up to feed Russian soldiers.  We would
beg the Russians to let us eat their food.  Sometimes they'd say yes.

Other times, they'd shoo us away, and we had to continue walking.

Along the way, we kept picking up camp survivors.  First, we ran into a
group of twelve women.  They were from Birkenau and were trying to get
home.  These women thought that by traveling with a group of children,
they might, somehow, find their own kids.  They kept hoping other child
survivors would join us-perhaps their own.

I took down their first and last names, their date of birth, their
hometowns, even their barracks number at Auschwitz, and added them to
my list.  I gave these women the same order I'd given the twins: to
stick together and keep up with the group.  By the time we got to
Krakow, an additional one hundred male survivors had also joined our
group.

I felt as if I were leading a small army: 153 men, women, and children,
to be precise.  I know the exact number because I continued to keep a
neat list.  I am not sure why preparing those lists was so important to
me in the middle of all the chaos and confusion.  I suppose it was my
own way of maintaining some form of control.  Even at the camp, I was
obsessed with maintaining lists and keeping the children in order.  I
felt it was the key to our survival.  And I have kept those lists even
to this day.

My system helped convince Russian authorities to let us through the
various roadblocks.  Wherever we stopped, Russian Army officials would
interrogate me as to who I was and what I was doing.  I'd show them the
lists, which impressed them.  They were generally understanding, and
gave me official documents authorizing me to lead the twins home.

PETER SOMOGYL: On the last leg of the trip between Auschwitz and
Krakow, a Russian truck picked us up and gave us a ride.  When we got
to Krakow, we found an abandoned house-it had no furniture, no heat,
nothing.

All the twins slept together on the floor.

Twins' Father found a Red Cross center that would feed us once a day.

For the rest of our meals, we had to beg strangers for food.

I remember going around Krakow, marching from house to house every day
asking for a slice of bread.  Some of the Poles were nice to the
twins.

But many were very mean.  Even though they knew we were survivors from
the death camp, they told us to go away.

We got very little from the Russians.  There were no provisions for
people other than those in the Russian Army.

At one point, Twins' Father tried to get the Russians to give us a
vehicle so he could take us home more quickly, but he couldn't arrange
it.  I guess they had other problems on their minds than the fate of a
bunch of the Jewish war orphans.

TWINS' FATHER: The trip home was a nightmare.  All of Europe was in
disarray.  The rail system had been completely destroyed.  We would
board a train, then another train, and get absolutely nowhere.  At
times, we would take a train, and it would take us in the opposite
direction from where we wanted to go.

When we got to the Hungarian border, I decided I needed a system to
make sure everyone could get home as quickly as possible.  I was most
concerned about the children, of course.  I decided to divide them into
little groups, splitting everyone up by where they were going.

I assigned older twins to be in charge of younger ones.  I gave the
senior boys my address-I assumed I was returning to my old house and
told them to let me know how the trip went.  Then, I set out with a
small group of my own toward Munkacs, my native village in
Czechoslovakia.

PETER SOMOGYL: My brother and I and a few other twins boarded a train
bound for Budapest.  Before hugging us good-bye, Twins' Father made
sure we were going in the right direction.

There was no regular source of food, so once again we were forced to
beg.  We asked Russian soldiers on the trains to give us some bread.

We finally arrived in a small town inside Hungary, not far from
Budapest.  There were Jews living there who had somehow survived the
war.  They invited us into their home, and gave us some very greasy
chicken soup.  These Jews were very kind to us.  But it had been so
long since we'd eaten a real meal, we got very sick.  We were ill for
days, unable to move.

It took Us a few more days to get to Budapest.  Someone at the train
station-I am not sure who-directed us to a Jewish orphanage.

We were the very first survivors of a death camp to come back to
Hungary, and our arrival made big news in the Budapest Jewish
community.

Although the Hungarian Jewish community had been decimated by the Nazis
in the last months of the war, many Jews in the capital had survived
without being deported.  Budapest hadn't been emptied of its Jewish
population, as was the case with smaller Hungarian cities and towns.  A
lot of them had remained in hiding.  Several Jewish families had even
managed to remain intact.

One of my mother's cousins heard about us.  He came to get us, and
together we began the journey back to our hometown of Pecs.

Back at Auschwitz, Mengele's experiments claimed their last victim.

For much of her stay at the camp, Ruthie Rosenbaum had been desperately
ill.  She had remained alive only because of the relentless efforts of
her twin sister, Judith, and their mother.  By the time the Russians
arrived, she was dying.  Hoping to save her, Russian doctors quickly
administered powerful medications.  But despite their efforts, she died
on March 3, 1945, her six-year-old body worn out from the tests and
fear, hunger, and pain-and the Russian drugs, which ultimately proved
to be lethal.

Mrs.  Rosenbaum and Judith began the long journey to their native Cluj,
in Romania.  The trip through devastated Eastern Europe, as thousands
of other survivors were groping their way home, took months.  But
mother and daughter both hoped for a happy reunion.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: When we got to Cluj, there was a list at the train
station of the Jews who had returned.  From our entire family, only one
uncle had made It back.  He had learned we were coming, and that only
one twin had survived.  But he didn't know which one-me or Ruthie.

His first question to my poor mother was,

"Who came back, Judith or Ruthie?"

We learned from him that most of our family had been killed in the war,
that most of the Jews of Cluj had died.

PETER SMOGYL: We came home only to find there was no home.  We quickly
learned that not a single Jew from our town had returned: They had all
died in the concentration camps.

My family's house had been vandalized, our furniture burnt by
townspeople or soldiers to keep warm.  But I had seen so much
destruction that I took the destruction of my own home very
matter-of-factly.  During our march out of Auschwitz with Twins'
Father, we had gone through a town where there wasn't a single house
still standing.  When you see an entire town in ruins, what can you say
to the fact that your own little house is no more?

TWINS' FATHER: When I finally arrived in Munkacs, I went straight to my
old house.

But I found there were strangers living there.  The new owners were
scared to see me.  You see, they'd simply taken it over after the
family was deported.  They went out of their way to treat me nicely.

They even gave me mail I'd received.  There were letters from several
of the twins, telling me they'd gotten home safely.  There were even
"reports" on how they'd accompanied their younger charges without any
problems.

Inside the house, I didn't see very much of our old furniture.  Only a
big mirror we used to own.

It was awful-awful-simply awful.

I stayed in Munkacs exactly one day and one night.  Then I ran away.  I
couldn't bear to live in my own village anymore.

The twins who were still at Auschwitz under the Russians' care or in
the monastery at Katowice had only one desire-to get home as quickly as
possible and meet up with relatives.  Some children set off alone.

Others found adults willing to accompany them for part of the
journey.

For most, the long-awaited return home ended in bitter
disappointment.

Nearly all were orphans, many the sole survivors of their entire
families, even of their whole village.

EVA MOZES: For almost a year, we had lived for the moment when we would
go home.

At the monastery, we were told we could be taken to Palestine.  But my
sister, Miriam, and I wanted to go back to Romania and see who had
survived.  We thought we would get home and there would be someone to
greet us-that someone besides us must have survived the war.

Because of our adventures riding the streetcars, we knew of a displaced
persons' camp in Katowice where several people we had known at
Auschwitz were staying.  There, we found the mother of a pair of twin
girls who was from our hometown.

She agreed to come with us to the monastery and sign papers for our
release.  Together with her daughters, we began the journey home.

As we approached our old house, I was still hoping against hope that
someone would be there.  We reached the gate.  The house looked
neglected.  There were tall weeds around it.  It did not look at all as
I remembered it.

Only our old dog, Lilly, was still there.  It was the only familiar
face.  I guess the Germans had not deported Jewish dogs.

It was so different from what we had expected our homecoming to be.  I
was heartbroken.  Miriam and I started running.  We were both crying
hysterically.

By the time Mengele's twins were liberated, the SS doctor himself had
made his way to another concentration camp, Gross Rosen, in Poland's
Upper Silesia.  Several hundred kilometers from Auschwitz, it promised
a temporary reprieve while the Russians advanced.  There, Mengele
slipped easily into the familiar routine of camp physician.

At thirty-four, he was a veteran death-camp hand.  He made inspection
tours of the camp and signed death certificates.  Alas, his duties at
Gross Rosen included neither experiments nor selections.  When it
became known the Russians were close to overrunning Gross Rosen,
Mengele prepared to vanish again.  He left Gross Rosen just before the
Russians reached it on February 11, 1945.  After Gross Rosen, Mengele's
route is unclear.  However, he was spotted by some of his twins in yet
another death camp, Mauthausen, in the no-man's-land of
Czechoslovakia.

Mauthausen was situated in what was essentially the last German
front.

Several of the twins had ended up there after the Death March.

At least two claim to have recognized

"Uncle Mengele" immediately.

If he saw them, or remembered them, he gave no sign of recognition.

MOSHE OFFER: I was in Mauthausen for about two or three weeks after the
Death March.  Then I was put along with other camp survivors on a train
bound for I don't know where.

It was very crowded.  I felt a push, and I fell off the train.  To this
day, I don't know if it was because I was so skinny, or because someone
was trying to save me.  In any case, I landed in a field.  My hand was
broken from the fall from the train.

I crawled through the field, and I looked up to see a big German in
uniform.  I started crying and asked him to kill me.  I told the Nazi I
was a Jew.  "I fell off the train, and I cannot take it anymore, so go
ahead and kill me."

But the old German soldier said to me,

"I won't kill you-I am going to hide you."  And so he took me to an
attic where they were storing corn and other grain.

This old German soldier was very nice.  Every day, he brought me some
dry biscuits and water.  From the window of the attic, I saw the war
coming to an end.  I saw trains go by, carrying munitions.  I watched
German airplanes being shot down and parachutists jumping out and being
shot themselves.

One day, in the middle of the night, I heard artillery fire.  After
that night, the German didn't come anymore.  I no longer got food or
water.  And so I began eating the corn and grain.

For four days, I was without any food or water.  I was very hungry,
very thirsty.  But I stayed in the attic because I was also very
frightened.

Then one day I looked out from the window and saw a jeep.  It was
carrying American soldiers.  I was so weak, I couldn't walk, and so I
crawled on my hands and knees from the attic to the jeep.

The American GIs spotted me and rescued me.  They carried me in their
arms to their jeep, and they gave me candy and chocolates.  But I was
so sick, I couldn't even eat them.

The GIs took me to one of their doctors near Linz, in Austria, who
treated me.  Then they gave me a little uniform to wear-an American GI
uniform.

I became their mascot.  I would stand in line to get food, just like
the other soldiers.  But they let me go to the head of the line.  They
gave me dollars, toys, suitcases filled with candy.

I told them what had happened to me, how I had been at Auschwitz, and
that my entire family had been killed.  Some American soldiers in the
group offered to take me home with them to America.  But I got very
sick, and they had to leave me behind.  I came down with a high fever,
and I was diagnosed as having typhoid.  I was put in a convent hospital
in Linz, where for four months I lay in bed.  I couldn't even open my
eyes.

I never saw the American soldiers again.

I told the people in the convent I wanted to go home-to Hungary.

When Mauthausen seemed in danger of falling to the Russians in May
1945, Mengele quickly shed his SS uniform and donned the outfit of a
soldier of the Wehrmacht.  He joined a German field hospital,
submerging himself in the sea of embittered soldiers of the defeated
army.  The unit wandered between U.S.-and Soviet-held territories.  At
last, the unit surrendered to the American Army, and with his
comrades, Mengele became a prisoner of war.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: We were liberated much later than the other
twins.  In fact, when we first heard the war was over-we didn't believe
it.

After the Death March, we had ended up in a small town in Germany
called Pritzberg, and everything was very chaotic, very confused.

Someone shouted,

"The war is over," and we thought they were joking.

When we realized it was true, we didn't know where to go, what to do.

We wandered through the streets of Pritzberg, crying, in our torn,
dirty dresses.

Some French soldiers in the town noticed us.  They felt sorry for
us-two fourteen-year-old girls, obviously war orphans.  They picked us
up in their jeep and brought us to their headquarters.  There, we were
fed-our first real meal since before the war.

It was hard to communicate with the French soldiers.  We spoke no
French or German-only Hungarian.  But they were very nice.  We were
able to make them understand how much we wanted to go home-to our
hometown in Hungary.  They gave us two suitcases and some cans of
sardines, and they put Us on a train bound for Hungary.

But instead of taking us home, it went in the opposite direction, to
Czechoslovakia.  At last, we managed to board a train to our
hometown.

There, we were met by two widowed uncles-the only members of our family
who had survived.

We told them we were left alive because we were twins.

They took us by our old house.  Everything had been taken-there was
nothing left that had belonged to our family.

It was so sad.  We couldn't stop crying.

Confined to a POW camp near Munich, Mengele became deeply depressed and
even contemplated suicide, according to his written account of that
period.  He confided his situation to a fellow prisoner, a doctor named
Fritz Ulmann.  Ulmann had an extra set of ID papers, which Mengele
gratefully accepted: They would be extremely useful should he need to
conceal his true identity.  He carefully altered the card and became
Fritz Hollman.  By June 1945, American Occupation forces had begun
rounding up Nazi functionaries and throwing them in jails and
internment camps.  More than fifty-thousand suspected Nazis-Gestapo
heads, Hitler Youth leaders, members of the Nazi Peasants' League, SS
officers-were imprisoned.

Mengele would have been a prime candidate for automatic arrest had the
Americans been able to identified' him.  They believed they had
developed a foolproof technique for singling out former members of the
SS.  Since all SS officers had been required to have their blood group
tattooed beneath one arm, American soldiers looked for the tattoo
itself or for a sign that it had been removed.  As it turned out,
Mengele's supreme vanity saved him: When he had joined the Waffen SS in
1940, he had refused on aesthetic grounds to submit to the tattoo.  On
August 18, 1945, Mengele was released from the POW camp by soldiers who
saw no evidence that he had been in the SS.

According to his son, Rolf, Mengele returned to his parents' home in
Gunzburg sometime during that summer.  He did not stay with them
because it was too dangerous; instead, he was forced to hide out in the
woods, where his family furtively provided him with food.  But U.S.
Occupation forces were establishing outposts around Germany, and
Mengele was compelled to seek another hiding place, according to an
autobiographical novel he wrote years after the war.  The "novel" was
among the papers Rolf turned over to the German magazine Bunte in
1985.

Bunte obligingly gave it to the German prosecutors, who passed it along
to the United States Justice Department.  Although purportedly a
fictional account of the adventures of a World War II veteran, the book
so closely dovetails with actual events in Mengele's postwar life that
it was used by the Justice Department in piecing together the war
criminal's path after leaving Auschwitz.  Mengele evidently decided to
contact Ulmann's brother-in-law, a doctor practicing near Munich (he is
described pseudonymously in the novel).

This doctor sympathized with the war criminal's plight, and provided
Mengele with the name of a farmer who could provide him with temporary
refuge.

Mangolding, a small farming community outside Munich, had not been
touched by the war.  When Mengele arrived at the farm of George
Fischer, he told the farmer he was a refugee in need of a job.

In an interview with Bunte magazine in 1985, Fischer revealed that he
agreed to take Mengele on as a farmhand if the young man proved he
could do the job.  His first task was to sort the potato crop,
separating potatoes suitable for human consumption from those of
inferior quality, which could be used as animal feed.  He was to make
two piles: good potatoes to the right and bad ones to the left.

Fischer warned Mengele to choose carefully; with the scarcity of food,
potatoes were a precious commodity.

Mengele concentrated on the task at hand, and exerted himself to do it
well-taking as much care, perhaps, as when he had served on the
selection ramp of Auschwitz.  He distinguished himself at potato
culling and got the job.  As a farmhand, not only was He safe from the
authorities, but in the midst of the confusion, starvation, and poverty
engulfing the rest of Germany, Mengele was assured a good home and
plenty of food.  He even had time to devote to his favorite activity,
reading.  He read voraciously, staying up late to finish a book, then
rising early the next morning to do his chores.

To the Fischer family, Mengele displayed many of the endearing
qualities of the Beppo of old.  He kept the family entertained with his
light banter.  The household took a deep liking to their new hired
hand, especially the Fischers' small children.  On Christmas Eve, he
played Saint Nicholas for them.  According to the Fischer family,
Mengele gave a hilarious performance impersonating the crotchety,
benevolent German Father Christmas.  Mengele's reputation as a thespian
was assured, and thereafter he was frequently called upon to
entertain.

The only member of the household who distrusted Mengele was the
farmer's brother, Alois.  Noting Mengele's odd habit of washing his
hands after finishing every chore, Alois concluded he had never been a
farmhand or a soldier, and figured out that their stylish employee was
probably a wanted high-ranking Nazi, using his brother's house to hide
out.  But he didn't give Mengele away.  The war criminal was able to
lead a relatively peaceful life for over three years.  Of course,
toiling as a farmhand was a blow to Mengele's self-esteem, but his
notebooks reveal he consoled himself by dreaming of his future, when he
would return to his science and his experiments.  Mengele's greatest
source of anxiety came from not having news of his family.  He didn't
dare show himself in Gunzburg again, but like all the refugees of this
long and devastating war, he longed to know how his parents and
brothers, his wife and his son, were doing.

MENASHE LORINCZI: Neither Lea nor I knew after the war that our father
was alive.  We assumed he had suffered the same fate as our mother.

After several months under the Russians' care at the Auschwitz clinic,
Lea and I left the concentration camp and tried to find our way home,
to Cluj.

There were still thousands of survivors wandering around Eastern
Europe, trying to find their way back home.  It was very difficult.

Much of Eastern Europe's rail system had been heavily bombed.  Even
months after Liberation, it was not functioning properly.  We would
board a train, and a few kilometers along the way we would get to a
river and the train would stop, unable to continue because a bridge had
been bombed.  All the passengers were forced to get out, wade through
the river, walk to a village, and wait for days until another train
arrived.

It took several months for us to make it back home to Cluj.  We found
one uncle-our only relative to have survived.

Unbeknownst to Lea and me, our father had spent the war in the relative
safety of a Russian labor camp.  He'd spent the last months of the War
and Liberation mourning his entire family, certain all of us had
perished at the hands of the Nazis.

Ironically, he found out we were still alive because of a newspaper
article-one that quoted me at the time of Liberation.  The interviews I
gave to the press corps who came to inspect Auschwitz after Liberation
were published all over the world.  An account of my experiences under
Dr.  Mengele even found its way to a Russian newspaper widely read in
my father's labor camp.

My sister and I were identified by name-as was our father.  As a result
of this story, he learned my twin sister and I were still alive.

LEA LORINCZI: Our father began making intensive efforts to locate us.

He had no idea where we or our mother might be.  At last, he found out
we were back in our old hometown in Cluj.  After he pleaded with the
Russians, they agreed to release him from labor camp.  He was put on a
transport with sick people and began the long journey to Cluj.

One day, he turned up at our door.

The reunion was heartbreaking.  He didn't know what had happened to our
mother.  "Where is Mommy?"  he kept asking us.

MENASHE LORINCZI: I will never forget that day as long as I live.  We
were laughing and crying at the same time.

Father took my sister and me in his arms.  Then he sat down.  He put me
on one knee and Lea on the other.  He wouldn't stop kissing us.  And we
couldn't stop crying.

We didn't have the heart to tell him what we suspected: that she'd
perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

It took a long time before we could talk to our father about the last
time we saw our mother.  In the meantime, he moved in with us and we
started life anew.  We were so happy to be with him-but we were also so
sad, because our mother was not with us.

As refugees kept coming back, we would ask them about our mother what
had happened to her, did they ever see her?  Her fate was a complete
mystery.  The answer was always,

"We don't know."

Anxious for news about his wife and family, Mengele asked his friend
the doctor to visit Gunzburg.  Ulmann's brother-in-law was going on
vacation and would be passing the Bavarian town, so he was glad to
oblige.  Once in Gunzburg, he discreetly sought meetings with various
members of Josef's family.  He let everyone know their beloved Beppo
was safe.

Meanwhile, the once-proud Mengele family had problems of its own.  The
indomitable Walburga was deathly ill; she would expire shortly after
the New Year, in 1946.  Mengele's father was being scrutinized by U.S.
Occupation authorities for his Nazi involvement during the war.  It
would not be long before he would be placed in a detention camp.

Lolo, Josef's younger brother, who had fought in France, was also a
POW, languishing in a camp in Yugoslavia.  As for Irene and little
Rolf, they had moved after the war from Freiburg to the Gunzburg area
and were being taken care of by the Mengele family.  Because of the
famine that was ravaging Germany, Irene had had no choice but to leave
her hometown: at least in Gunzburg, with her wealthy in-laws, she could
be assured of food for herself and little Rolf.  But she had left
Freiburg, a lively center of culture, somewhat reluctantly for stifling
Gunzburg.  Irene's parents accompanied her and the child, and together,
they rented a house in nearby Autenried.

Irene learned that her husband was surviving, but she knew little of
how he was faring in these dangerous times.  American Army
investigators had been to Gunzburg inquiring after her husband's
whereabouts.  By late 1945, the search for Nazi war criminals, rather
than dying down, had intensified, as the Allies made preparations for
war crimes trials.  Specialists at the U.S. Army Counterintelligence
Corps, whose regional headquarters were in Augsburg, thirty minutes
away from Gunzburg, joined the search, as did many other units and
agencies.

As survivors emerged to talk about Auschwitz, Dr.  Mengele's name was
heard more and more frequently.  Although many doctors had served on
the selection ramp of Birkenau, victims seemed to recall Josef Mengele
most vividly, hence the start of the legend surrounding the Angel of
Death.  The image of the elegant young SS doctor who whistled and
smiled as he sent people to die was indelibly imprinted in their
memories.

Only the twins remained silent.  Several had made it back to their
native villages and moved in with distant relatives.  After their
ordeal with the Nazis, they were relieved to be home, although their
homes had changed: They were now under the control of the Communists.

Some were scattered in relocation centers and orphanages throughout
Europe, awaiting transport to Palestine.  Still others were in Catholic
convents being cared for by nuns, along with other war orphans.

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 anti-Semitic 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 anti-Semitism.  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.

We were very religious, and the Communists didn't want religion.

My twin and I attended a Jewish school, just as we had before the
war.

We worked very hard.

But the Communists closed down our Jewish school.  They forced us to
attend classes on the Sabbath.

It was awful.  It brought back the terrible years before the war, when
there had been so much anti-Semitism.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I felt the anti-Semitism at school very keenly.  At
first, I attended a Jewish school, and was protected.  Then, the
Communists engineered what they called an "educational reform."  They
shut down the Jewish schools.

In my new school, nobody wanted to be my friend.  The Christian boys
and girls would have nothing to do with me.

I felt all alone.

As the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg continued its grim
business, and as death-camp survivors emerged from the shadows to
testify, Mengele's name began to appear on the wanted lists of more and
more countries.  Perhaps the Nuremberg Tribunal, concerned as it was
with statesmen and generals, would not have been the proper forum to
try Mengele even had he been captured.  But Mengele would have made an
ideal defendant fur the British-run Belsen trials.  Held in Luneberg,
site of the old Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, these trials took
place at the end of 1945, at the same time as Nuremberg was getting
under way.

Many of the Luneberg defendants had served both at Auschwitz and at
Bergen-Belsen; among them were many of Mengele's old cronies, including
some SS doctors.  One of them, Dr.  Josef Kramer, had been a
high-ranking physician at Auschwitz-Birkcnau.  According to former
inmates, the imperious, thuggish Kramer was one of the few men at
Auschwitz-perhaps the only man-that Dr.  Mengele feared.

However, the "star" defendant of the Belsen trials was not Kramer but
Irma Grese, Mengele's old sidekick.

After the fall of Auschwitz, Irma had sought to continue her death camp
career at Bergen-Belsen.  There, too, she had quickly distinguished
herself for her wanton cruelty.  She would beat prisoners with her own
hands, sometimes until they fell unconscious and died.  Only at the
end, amid rumors that British troops were about to overrun the camp,
did Grese make an about-face and treat prisoners with a semblance of
kindness.  She even dared ask them to put in a good word for her.  But
her entreaties did not help.  When the British entered Bergen-Belsen
and saw the mounds of dead and dying, Grese was rounded up with other
Nazis.

During the trial, prosecutors wondered how such "a very young girl"
could have committed acts of such "very great savagery and cruelty."

When Irma took the stand, she seemed curiously subdued.

She readily admitted to many of the accusations leveled against her.

In her own defense, she only pointed out that she had acted with the
approval of higher authorities-most notably, Dr.  Josef Mengele.  She
had "always" accompanied Mengele; he had been her boss.

Mengele's fair companion was hanged, along with Dr.  Kramer.

Luneberg was the first, but by no means the last, of the many war
crimes trials from which Mengele would be conspicuously absent.  The
proceedings did establish early on a record of his crimes at
Auschwitz.

By the end of the Luneberg trial, much was already known about his
actions as an SS camp doctor.  Even amid the panoply of Nazi horrors,
Mengele stood out for the sheer magnitude of his crimes.

TWINS' FATHER: I was shocked when I was reunited with my sister,
Magda.  We met after I had l Munkacs and settled in a different city,
in Romania.

I worked as an accountant, and someone told my brother-in-law where I
was.

My twin sister had been such a beautitul girl before the war.  But she
was completely changed, and in a terrible way.  She had a beard all
over her face-a real man's beard.

It was horrifying to look at her, and to remember how she had once
been, so radiant and happy with her young son-the little boy Mengele
sent to the gas chambers.

MAGDA SPIEGEL: I was very broken down after the war, very sick.

I was able to locate my husband, and we were quickly reunited.

He had spent the war in labor camps all over Russia.  We decided to
settle in Czechoslovakia.

I missed my son.  I wanted a child very much.  But I did not have my
periods.  I was very frightened.  I didn't know what they had done to
me at Auschwitz-nobody knew.

I went to many doctors.  They told me,

"Wait."

After a long time, I started functioning normally again.  I became
pregnant, and gave birth to another boy.

But I continued to think about Auschwitz.  I was always having
nightmares about the camp.

The Nuremberg and Belsen trials only intensified the Allied powers'
desire to punish the criminals of the Third Reich.  As new, exhaustive
manhunts got under way, Mengele was forced to remain in hiding under
his alias of

"Fritz Hollman."  Despite the security Mangolding offered, Mengele was
unhappy at the Fischer farm, where the work was tedious and exhausting.
He could not get used to the harsh regime of physical labor and
developed severe shoulder pains.  His main distraction continued to
come from books.  And whenever he could, he visited his friend, Dr.
Ulmann's brother-in-law, where the two discoursed on everything from
medicine to the affairs of the day -specifically, the Nuremberg
trials-and even talked about Mengele's future hopes.

Unbelievably, he somehow still thought he could resume a normal life
and become a university professor, like his old mentor Verschuer.

Mengele's cunning old patron was faring considerably better than his
former assistant.  Although he had been the force and the inspiration
behind Mengele's deadliest experiments at Auschwitz, Verschuer never
had to hide out on an isolated farm.  On the contrary, he was highly
visible as he sought  to get his old job back as head of the
reconstituted Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute being formed at the University
of Frankfurt.

Verschuer was as much an opportunist after the war as he had been under
Nazi rule.  In February 1945, as the Russians were approaching Berlin,
he had fled to his hometown of Solz, taking the institute's entire
library with him.  This included eighty-eight cases of books on
heredity and racial science, along with fifteen cases of books from his
personal collection, most of which he hid in small inns around Solz.

It is also believed that Verschuer hid or destroyed any evidence that
could be used against him, including his voluminous correspondence
with Mengele at Auschwitz.  As news surfaced of what his protege had
done at the death camp, Verschuer feigned surprise and indignation.  He
claimed to the press that he had no knowledge of selections and
gassings, grotesque experiments and mass murders.  Certainly, he had no
idea how Mengele had gathered the grisly twins' specimens that had been
sent to him personally at the Berlin Institute.  Verschuer said he had
assumed that the slides and tissue samples, organs and skeletal
remains, had come from people who had died "of natural causes.

In order to make sure he got his old job back, Verschuer made Mengele
the scapegoat, passing off responsibility for any scientific excesses
onto his protege; just how Mengele felt at seeing himself blamed by his
former idol is unknown: There is no apparent reference to Verschuer in
any of his papers.  But Verschuer also resorted to many other lies to
regain entry into the academic fold.  For example, he told the mayor of
Frankfurt, who was overseeing the opening of the university, that he
was close to developing a vaccine for tuberculosis.  It was an
ingenious idea: In the postwar months, an epidemic was raging
throughout Germany, and there was an all-out search for a vaccine or a
cure.

Forced like thousands of other Germans to undergo

"Denazification,"

whereby former Nazis were probed for the extent of their involvement
with the Reich, Verschuer was able to con the Americans who presided
over the procedure into thinking he had been little more than a
victim.

If the Denazification authorities had found him to be an active Nazi,
criminal charges would have been filed; as it was, Mengele's mentor was
declared to have been only a "hanger-on" of the Nazi regime, and fined
the trifling sum of six hundred marks.  His appeal was also helped by
the accolades of his former colleagues at the University of Frankfurt,
who heartily endorsed his efforts to regain his former chair.

Like his favorite student, Otmar von Verschuer had no regrets about his
commitment to eugenics, or about what he had done in the name of
science.  In years past, he had raised the pitch of his scientific
preachings to appeal to the Nazi rulers.  Now, Verschuer knew exactly
how to soft-pedal his views to gain the trust of the postwar
establishment.

By the end of 1945, while the fugitive Mengele was sorting potatoes and
cleaning stables, his teacher was on his way to attaining his former
prominence.  Versehuer was able to slip, chameleon like into the
protective coloration of an innocent academician who has been trapped
in evil surroundings.  While men who had been far less influential in
the Nazi regime than he now feared for their lives, Otrnar von
Verschuer worried only about restoring his lost reputation.

Verschuer's self-serving technique was useful to other ex-Nazis as
well.  Mengele rapidly became the scapegoat not only for his old
professor, but also for many of the theorists of racial science.  They
pretended the Auschwitz doctor was an aberration who had distorted the
"ideals" of eugenics.  Despite the fact that their theories had been
used to justify the killing of millions of "inferior" human beings,
they chose not to condemn these theories, but only the man who had best
put them into practice.  They rejoiced when Mengele was thrust into the
limelight, for it meant their own actions would remain obscured.

Verschuer's attempts to return to the University of Frankfurt, which
were going so smoothly in 1945, ran into trouble in 1946.  Two of his
more ethical former colleagues, upon hearing of his possible read
pointment, published a lengthy article on May 3, 1946, in the Neue
Zeitung, a Frankfurt daily, describing Verschuer's activities during
the war.  The two scientists, who had worked with Verschuer for many
years, exposed the fact that he had corresponded with Mengele and knew
exactly what was going on at Auschwitz.  They charged that he had known
about the layout, functions, and activities of the death camp, and was
well aware of the source of the "specimens" he regularly received from
Auschwitz: Jews put to death by Mengele.  As an intimate of the Nazi
hierarchy in Berlin, Verschuer knew about the Final Solution, had
advocated killing Jews as a eugenic measure, and, the doctors claimed,
also knew precisely how the exterminations were being carried out,
since they believed he himself had visited Auschwitz.

The scandal that resulted from the publication of the Neue Zeitung
article aborted Verschuer's plans to resume his career in Frankfurt.

More significantly, the ensuing brouhaha brought both Verschuer and
Mengele to the attention of U.S. authorities at Nuremberg.  As the
international military tribunals were winding down, plans were being
made to conduct additional trials.  There was to be a special
proceeding for individuals who had worked in the death camps.

At the Berlin office of the U.S. Counsel for War Crimes, a young
investigator named Manfred Wolfson was assigned to look into the
bizarre affair of Doctors Mengele and Verschuer.  Despite the large
backlog of cases, Wolfson began digging into the two men's
backgrounds.

He interviewed their former colleagues from Kaiser-Wilhelm and quickly
grasped that Verschuer was as important a target as the more notorious
Auschwitz doctor.  As Wolfson probed Verschuer's past, he discovered
the professor had consistently used his position as a racial scientist
to enhance his ties with the Nazis.  He also noted the frequent
anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler references in articles

"Verschuer had published in the thirties and early forties.

In a 1946 report Wolfson carefully prepared for his superiors, he made
it clear that most of the horrors for which Mengele was becoming famous
had been perpetrated under the aegis of Verschuer.  Wolfson wrote that
even Mengele's passion for experimenting on human eyes could be traced
back to Verschuer.  His old professor had been studying the development
of pigmentation in eyes, and had a keen interest in different-colored
or hetero chromatic eyes.  To satisfy Verschuer's needs, Mengele would
gas inmates who possessed this unusual trait, then ship the eyes to him
in Berlin.

These gruesome discoveries prompted Wolfson to recommend that
"Verschuer be "interrogated and tried."  Only after exposing Mengele's
mentor did Wolfson pursue his former protege.  He cited witnesses who
described Mengele's obsessive interest in pseudo medical tests on
inmates.  He noted the camp doctor's fascination with the sterilization
of women.  And, of course, he described Mengele's passion for young
twins.  "Twins and triplets, predominantly children, were kept in
separate barracks so they could be experimented on properly," one
survivor had told Wolfson.  This man recounted how his own twins had
been placed in Mengele's hands upon their arrival in Auschwitz in July
1944.  He had asked Mengele whether he would ever see his children
again.  "Of course!"  Mengele reportedly replied, cheerful as ever.

But as the grieving father moumfully observed,

"To date, I have not seen anyone, nor had any news."

MENASHE LORINCzI: For one year after the war, we had no news about our
mother.  As refugees kept coming back, we would ask them if they had
seen her: Was she here?  Was she there?  Finally, by talking to dozens
of people, we were able to piece together what had become of her.

Mother had been part of a group of traveling women workers.  She had
spent some time working at Auschwitz, then had been transferred to
several other labor camps around Poland.

At last, she ended up in Riga, a death camp in Latvia.  What the Nazis
couldn't do at Auschwitz, they succeeded in doing in Riga: They simply
killed everybody.

They put all the women and children on a ship in the middle of the
Baltic Sea, and sank it.  Everyone drowned.

My sister couldn't accept the fact that Mother had died.  Lea kept
believing Mother had somehow survived.  We both did.

We would think,

"Maybe she is still in Russia."

LEA LORINCzI: I cried myself to sleep every night those first years
after the war, thinking about my mother.  I often dreamt that Mother
had come home.

Then, I would get up and realize it was only a dream, and I would start
crying again.

It was a period when I felt very sad.  I did not want to be with other
people.  My father was also depressed.  He missed our mother very much,
and always wanted to talk about her.

MENASHE LORINCZI: My sister was very unhappy, and she tried to forget
her sorrow by burying herself in the Communist movement.  She was
extremely active in it.

She was not a very strong-minded person-she was easily suggestible, and
the Communists brainwashed her.

Lea wanted me to join, too, but I knew the Communists were no good.  I
knew they hated the Jews.

They always claimed to attack only

"Zionists."  But who were the "Zionists"?  The Jews.  Only the Jews.

I finally had to forcibly yank my sister out of the movement.

After that, I knew that we had to leave Hungary.  We had to emigrate to
Palestine.

But the Communists wouldn't let us go.

At the conclusion of his report, which Wolfson submitted to his
superiors in November 1946, the investigator recommended that

"SS

Haubsturmfuhrer Dr.  Josef Mengele be placed on the wanted list and
that he be indicted for war crimes."  At last, the Angel of Death
seemed about to get his due.

But Mengele, tucked away in his pastoral hideout, could not have been
more removed from the machinations to capture and try him.

He did not know of Wolfson's report, and was leading a quiet, peaceful
life.  His major source of anguish stemmed from his longing to be
reunited with his family.

Mengele's homesickness was relieved by a visit from his brother Karl in
October 1946.  The reunion was bittersweet.  Karl confirmed the sad
news of their mother's death and their father's imprisonment.  Karl
brought with him Hans Sedlmeier, an old school chum of Josef's, who was
now managing the farm-equipment factory.  The Mengeles had been forced
to turn over control of the company to Sedlmeier because of the
Americans' interest in disbanding any firms run by ex-Nazis.

Sedlmeier was an ideal interim manager, both because of his loyalty to
the Mengeles and the fact that he did not have a Nazi past.

The visit of Karl and Sedlmeier broke Mengele's isolation.  The two men
brought Mengele up to date on Gunzburg gossip as well as on how the
family business was faring.  And afterward, there was a steady stream
of visitors to the Mangolding farm area.  One day, Irene herself showed
up.  Their reunion was a curious mixture of tenderness and
disaffection.  Years later, Mengele relived the meeting in his
autobiographical novel: "I never believed that I would see you
again,"

lrmgard, the character who represents Irene, tells Andreas.  She had
apparently lost all hope of being reunited with her husband.

Irene advised Mengele to leave Germany at once; it was simply too
dangerous to remain there, she believed.  She told him how a few months
earlier an American officer and his interpreter had turned up at her
house, demanding to know where Mengele was.  Although very nervous
inside, she had managed to retain her composure.  Flashing her nicest
smile, Irene had told them the stock story: that Josef Mengele was
"missing" in the Eastern Campaign, and was presumed dead.

While the officer had listened sympathetically to the pretty young
woman, standing there with her young son, the interpreter-a Jewish
soldier-had been more skeptical.  He had lashed out at her, informing
her that Mengele was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews.

The two men had finally driven off, but it had taken all of her energy
to convince them she really knew nothing of her husband's
whereabouts.

The tension of having to cover for her war-criminal husband affected
Irene deeply, and added to her general unhappiness with her marital
situation.  Since their marriage, weeks before the start of the war,
Irene and her husband had spent little time together.  She had
stoically borne Josefs going off to war and, after that, to Auschwitz
for his scientific career.  But now, peace was here at last, the
country returning to normal life-yet still they were apart.  Her
husband was a fugitive, wanted by several governments for his alleged
wartime activities.  As their son, Rolf, would later reveal, although
Irene didn't believe the accusations leveled against Josef, she found
it frustrating not to be with the man she still loved, to be condemned
to live by herself, with none of the joys of family life she craved.

TWINS' FATHER: After the war, all the survivors wanted to get married,
to build homes, to forget the Holocaust and what had happened.

I met my wife seven months after Liberation.  She came from a small
village in Czechoslovakia.  She had also been interned in the camps.

We courted exactly four weeks.

We were married on January 27, 1946-exactly one year after
Liberation.

My first child was born less than a year later.

We lived in a beautitul city.  I had a good job and a very lovely
house.  Yet neither of us felt settled.

VERA GROSSMAN: When Mother came back to her hometown after the war, she
learned that no one in her family had survived.  Her parents and her
seven brothers and sisters had all gone to the gas chambers.  She was
completely alone, with two seven-year-old daughters to care for.

The three of us went back to our old estate-but the people who had
taken it over threatened to kill us.  And so we fled to another town.

Mother got together with another Jewish woman, also a camp survivor.

They rented two small rooms.  They would take in geese and feed
them-fatten them up-then sell them for a higher price.  People loved
buying fat geese, because they could get schmaltz -a thick, delicious
paste you make from the fat.

Eventually, Mother was able to buy a cow with the money she earned
fattening the geese.  She was convinced that as long as she had milk
for her twins, we would never be hungry again.

But she was always very nervous.  She worried about who would take care
of us if something happened to her.

One day, a man she had met at Auschwitz turned up at our door.

After Liberation, he had gone off to search for his family.  He
traveled throughout Europe, to Hungary, to Poland, to Czechoslovakia,
in search of survivors.  Only after he had determined that no one had
survived did he come to us and ask for Mother's hand.

They were married very quickly.  Mother said yes because she felt he
would be good to Olga and me, and take care of us.  And he did.

He missed his own family, and was very loving toward us.

We moved to another town.  There, we rented a large apartment.

Mother stopped working and had a baby.  Then she had another baby very
quickly afterward.  We were a family again.

But there were a lot of rats in that new apartment.  It reminded me of
Auschwitz.  Each time I saw a rat, I thought of Auschwitz.

TWINS' FATHER: I found I couldn't feel safe anywhere in Eastern
Europe-not after what had happened.

I simply didn't trust the land where I was living.  I had a feeling
there was nowhere in Eastern Europe I could really settle down and
establish roots.

My wife and I both wanted a place we could call home.  We wanted to
emigrate to Palestine.

All we could think of was running away from Europe and all its
memories.

We wanted out.

To Mengele's shock and dismay, during her visit Irene told him she
wanted out of the marriage, an idea she had obviously been
contemplating for some time.  A divorce would free her from the
innumerable burdens-and few rewards-of being Dr.  Mengele's wife.

Mengele was distraught.  "She wants to leave me because I am not back
home like the other husbands-as if it were my fault," the protagonist
in his book complains at one point.  Mengele was unsympathetic to his
wife's grumblings.  The doctor-turned-farmhand had troubles enough of
his own.  In his book, there is a scene where Andreas berates his wife,
sternly reminding her of the thousands of women whose husbands are POWs
and who are in equally dire straits.

The reunion with Irene left Mengele feeling depressed and forlorn.

In the manuscript he wrote decades later, he described his sadness at
losing both his mother and his wife.  Walburga's death clearly caused
him the most pain, however.  "One can never replace a mother," he
observes at one point.  But the prospect of losing Irene was almost as
distressing.  It upset Mengele's dream of once again leading a
traditional family life, even though the life he could now offer her
hardly fit the typical bourgeois mode.

Although Irene's advice to leave Germany made eminent sense in this
period of manhunts and war-crime trials, Mengele felt safe enough in
his farm retreat to risk staying put.  Did he really think his
notoriety would fade?  Could he possibly have believed that the Allies
would leave Germany and forget all about him?  The smug former dandy of
Gunzburg was certainly deluded enough to have entertained such
fantasies.  Perhaps in his heart he even hoped he would be able to
reemerge and resume his old life in his native land.  But for now, he
was also pragmatic enough to take no chances and remain in hiding.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: Life in our hometown in Hungary was very
disappointing, very sad.

We cried all the time.

Only two widowed uncles had survived from our entire family.  We were
taken to live with them.

These uncles were both very religious and very strict.  We quickly
realized there was no future for us in Hungary, there were no young
people left.  There was no Jewish community.

There was nothing-absolutely nothing.

We dreamt of going to Palestine, but our uncles forbid us to join the
local Zionist movement, the B'nai Akivah.  They didn't want us in any
coeducational groups.  We finally were able to find another Zionist
group that admitted only girls: Our uncles allowed us to join that.

We decided we wanted to build a new future for ourselves-in
Palestine.

The continuing Nuremberg proceedings, in particular the
concentration-camp doctors' trial, should have made life most
precarious for Mengele.  In the fall of 1946, twenty-three
representatives of the Nazi medical establishment were indicted.  Of
these, twenty were physicians, while the rest had served Nazi science
in administrative capacities.  It is ironic that this trial, where
Mengele ought to have been the star defendant, came and went without
him; the Wolfson memorandum, submitted even before the trial opened,
had carefully outlined the medical crimes both of Mengele and
Verschuer, urging that they be indicted.

Somewhere along the way, however, the report disappeared.  What became
of it is not known, even to Wolfson, who is now teaching languages for
the U.S. Army, and has settled on the West Coast.  It may have simply
fallen through the cracks, although one can conjure other, far more
sinister explanations.

To this day, that Mengele escaped judgment-even in absentia -in the
trial of doctors like himself remains a great mystery of the postwar
era.  More than any of his peers, he exemplified the excesses of Nazi
medical science.  He engaged in far greater atrocities than Dr.
Waldemar Hoven, the man picked by the Nuremberg team as the premier
example of death-camp physician.  Hoven, chief doctor of Buchenwald,
had participated in many selections-but he never conducted medical
experiments.  Conversely, those doctors on trial for their inhuman use
of human "guinea pigs" had not selected victims for the gas
chambers.

The Angel of Death of Auschwitz was one of the few Nazi doctors who had
both relished selection duty and performed human experiments.

"If they could have gotten hold of Mengele, there is no doubt he would
have been tried and sentenced to death," observed the late John
Mendelsohn, a leading authority on the Nuremberg Trials who worked at
the National Archives in Washington until his death in 1986.

Mendelsohn believed that Mengele's case was so outstanding, the sum of
his crimes so horrifying, that he should have been tried along with the
statesmen and generals before the international military tribunals.

At the doctors' trial, experts reached all the way back to ancient
Greece to find a suitable name to describe the perversions of German
science under Hitler.  They called it "thanatology," the science of
death, after Thanatos, the Greek spirit who personified death.  The
proceedings revealed that over two hundred German doctors had been
direct participants in "research" crimes, while hundreds, perhaps
thousands, more had stood silently by.  It was clear that no useful
scientific findings had resulted from these experiments--only the
suffering and deaths of helpless human beings.  At Buchenwald, doctors
had searched for a cure for malaria by exposing inmates to the
disease-carrying mosquitoes.  The prisoners were then "treated" with
large doses of questionable drugs, which invariably killed them.  At
the trial, female witnesses tearfully recalled the brutal sterilization
procedures they had undergone at Auschwitz and Ravensbruck.

But oddly enough, no witness or prosecutor mentioned the supreme
thanatologist, the Angel of Death, Dr.  Mengele.  No one mentioned the
medical experiments he'd performed on twins, triplets, dwarfs, and
giants.  The trial never discussed his diabolical tests, castrations,
and surgeries.  And not a word was said about the active cooperation
between Mengele and Professor Verschuer, one of the leading theoretical
scientists of the Third Reich.

The answer to this great mystery of why Mengele's name never surfaced
may lie in the sheer immensity of the medical crimes confronted by the
Nuremberg prosecutors.  According to Neal Slier, director of the U.S.
Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit,

"It is a commentary on the barbarity of the Nazis that someone with as
much blood on his hands as Mengele would not have been Number One on
the prosecutors' lists.  That fact alone should put into perspective
the unbelievable scope of the horrors."

Another Holocaust expert, Dr.  Robert Wolfe, director of captured
German records at the National Archives, offers a simpler explanation:
"He slipped through our fingers."  But in defense of the Nuremberg
team, Wolfe argues that "in this chaotic situation, it's remarkable we
caught as many as we did.  It's remarkable we even had a doctors'
trial, because people were getting tired."

Sure enough, by late 1946 and 1947, war-crimes trials were starting to
come under attack in the U.S. Congress.  American foreign policy was
changing.  The new enemies were no longer the butchers of the Hitler
era but the Communists.  If fighting them meant joining forces with
ex-Nazis, SS men, Gestapo agents, and German industrialists, the United
States was ready to do so.  American funding for Nazi prosecutions was
drastically cut, while funds were poured into recruiting agents to
aid in the fight against Communism.

EVA MOZES: There was a lot of anxiety in the Jewish community about
what the Communists were doing.  At first, compared to Auschwitz, life
in Eastern Europe seemed like heaven.  We didn't mind standing six
hours to get a loaf of bread.  Or waiting two days to buy a winter
coat.

At least we were free.

But then strange things started to happen.

Our house was raided a few times.  My uncle was taken away by the
secret police without explanation.  Other people were also picked up
and disappeared.

The Romanian government, faced with massive numbers of Jews who wanted
to leave, tried to deal with the situation in their own way.

They banned Zionist organizations.  They shut down Jewish schools.

At one point, my aunt built a false closet in the house-exactly like
the ones people had during the war.  It was very unpleasant, very
tense.

Our aunt decided there was no future in Romania.  We applied for visas
for all of us to go to Palestine.

MENASHE ioRINCzI: Jews simply didn't enjoy the same status as non-Jews
under the Communists.  We were not treated equally.

The government shut down the Jewish schools.  I joined a Zionist
agricultural camp in Bucharest.  I was taught to be a farmer.  I
learned how to drive a tractor, how to plant crops.  All of us at this
school wanted to go to Palestine and were preparing for the day that we
ould live there.

But within a few months, the Communists came, boarded up the camp, and
sent us all back home.

I knew then that I had to go to Palestine immediately.  I desperately
wanted to go, but the Communists would not let me emigrate.

In Augsburg, near Gunzburg, the regional headquarters of the U.S. army
Counterintelligence Corps recruited Klaus Barbie, the infamous

"Butcher of Lyons," as an American agent and operative in April 1947.
As head of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, Barbie had.

shipped groups of Jewish children to Auschwitz-among other misdeeds.

Yet, instead of being tried for war crimes, Barbie was placed on the
U.S. government payroll and treated like a prize source of information
on postwar Communist infiltration of Germany.

To those who question whether the Auschwitz doctor also benefited from
the same special treatment, it can be asserted that Mengele had little,
if any, intelligence value for American agents.  Genetics was simply
not an area of compelling interest to them.  It is probable, however,
that Verschuer, deft politician that he was, succeeded in convincing
U.S. officials that Mengele was a useful contact.  Years later, Manfred
Wolfson could only conclude that Verschuer had somehow wielded his
influence to have the charges, as enumerated in the investigator's
pretrial report, dropped.  Wolfson learned that Verschuer had become
friendly with key Americans running the Occupation government and
reportedly kept suggesting to them that the colleagues who were
discrediting him were

"Communist agents."

By the conclusion of Poland's second set of Auschwitz trials in
December 1947, the possibility of new war-crimes proceedings seemed
remote.  America and postwar Europe were anxious to bury the past and
get on with rebuilding.

But there were some people who refused to forget what the Angel of
Death had done.  In 1947, Gisella Perl, the Jewish doctor who had been
Mengele's assistant, published her shocking account of life at
Auschwitz.  Perl, who had made her way to the United States after the
war and resumed practicing medicine, was haunted by her memories of the
death-camp doctor.  Her book focused on Mengele, and she told story
after story of his atrocities at the concentration camp.  In graphic,
vivid prose, Perl wrote how Mengele had destroyed the lovely young
Jewish girl lbi Hillman, simply because she was so lovely.  She
movingly described the women of Birkenau's desperate ploy to please
Mengele, and survive his selections, by smashing bricks and applying
the red powder as a "rouge" to bring color to their pale faces.  And
she told of his unrelenting brutality toward anyone who stood in his
way.

Perl was under the impression that Mengele was to be tried at
Nuremberg-certainly not a farfetched assumption in the wake of
front-page press reports in Viennese and Budapest newspapers in
December 1946 that Mengele had been captured and was in jail.  At last,
here was the chance Perl had waited for to denounce the monster.  In
January 1947, she wrote to the Washington office in charge of the
war-crimes trials to offer herself as a witness.  In her letter, Perl
expressed her desire to testify "against this most perverse mass
murderer of the twentieth century."

Perl didn't even receive the courtesy of a reply.

She wrote to them yet again in the fall of 1947, renewing her offer.

"I have learned the trial of the greatest 'mass murderer' Doctor Josef
Mengerle (sic] will be held in Nuremberg.  . . I would be very pleased
to go there as a witness.  . . and awaken the conscience of the
world."

Dr.  Perl would certainly have made a dramatic witness at Mengele's
trial.  After months of working side by side with him, the articulate
young woman could have described the enormity of his crimes.  Even if
he had been tried in absentia, testimony by Perl would have caused such
a storm that a massive manhunt might well have been launched.

But the sheer incompetence-or duplicity-of U.S. authorities led them to
overlook both Perl's letters and her extraordinary book.  By the fall
of 1947, there was only a half-hearted effort to pursue Nazi war
criminals, and Perl's second offer was lost in the bureaucratic
shuffle.

A review of the U.S. Army's file on Mengele shows that her October 1947
letter was stamped

"Hold for Final Action."  A small note scribbled next to Mengele's name
states quite erroneously that he had been "tried by Poles."

America's Nuremberg team made at least three major mistakes with
respect to Perl, all of which helped Mengele evade capture.  When
reports of Mengele's arrest proved to be false, they didn't bother to
reply to her first letter and inform her that the war criminal was not
in their custody.  By the time of her second letter, they wrongly
assumed he was in the hands of the Polish government.  They compounded
the error by concluding that Poland had already tried and sentenced
Mengele.

But it was the Nuremberg team's last mistake which guaranteed that SS
Dr.  Josef Mengele's trial would never, ever take place.  Per Is
October 1947 letter was passed around from office to office, from
bureaucrat to bureaucrat, in Washington.  Then, it was dispatched
overseas to the men responsible for the Nureniberg prosecutions.  By
December, it had finally reached the desk of General Telford Taylor,
chief counsel for war crimes and the lead prosecutor at Nuremberg.

In January 1948, General Taylor wrote to Perl, apologizing for the
delay in responding.  Taylor's brief letter ended with a most startling
assertion: "We wish to advise our records show Dr.  Mengele (sic] is
dead as of October, 1946."

No one knows what prompted the Nuremberg investigators to conclude that
Mengele had died-in 1946, no less.  Even an exhaustive Justice
Department inquiry more than forty years later failed to clarify what
happened.  But all the available evidence points to the Mengele
family.

Beginning with Irene's clever donning of nLourning clothes and her
recital of a mass in memory of her "late" husband, the Mengele clan's
strenuous efforts at spreading disinformation had obviously
succeeded.

Their line that Josef was missing and presumed dead on the Eastern
front had somehow found its way even into official American war-crimes
files.  Since Nuremberg officials believed Mengele was dead, they
failed to continue the hunt for him.  The only other possible
conclusion is that U.S. authorities deliberately helped the Angel of
Death evade capture, but nothing has surfaced to buttress such a
theory.

In Mangolding, Mengele fretted over problems more pressing to him than
being tried for war crimes.  His writings on the period suggest that
his daily concerns centered less on avoiding capture than on
forestalling a divorce from his unhappy wife.  He remained deeply upset
over his crumbling marriage.  He continued to mourn his mother's
passing and the Gunzburg life he would never again know.

VERA GROSSMAN: The Communists made life very unsettled for us.

One day, a rabbi from England came to visit my parents.  His name was
Dr.  Shlomo Schoenfeld, and he ran a famous school in England.

Rabbi Schoenfeld was traveling through Eastern Europe, collecting
Jewish children to take back with him to Britain.  He wanted to offer
them a better life.

He convinced my parents that it was not safe for Olga and me to remain
with them in Eastern Europe.  We were nine years old at the time.  It
was only two years after Auschwitz.

Mother sadly agreed.  She hated to part with Us.  She always called us
her "miracle twins" because, as she liked to say, it was a "miracle"
that two little girls had survived both Auschwitz and Dr.  Mengele.

I understood her decision.  I may have been nine years old, but felt
like a grown-up person.

Still, I was heartbroken to leave her.

I remember the day they took us to have our pictures taken for our
travel documents.  I refused to smile.

We were placed on board a train, this time bound for England.

We were with lots of other war children.  Olga and I celebrated our
tenth birthday on that trip.

I felt very angry.

six.

THE STORY OF ANDREAS TWINS' FATHER.

By the late 19405, most of the surviving Jews of Eastern Europe-not
just the twins-had realized they had no future there, and were trying
desperately to get out.  We all felt home was in Palestine.

But it was almost impossible to emigrate-at least legally.  Many
members of my family, including my twin, Magda, managed to slip in
illegally, through Cyprus.

My wife and and I wanted to get legal visas.  But it was extremely
difficult to do so.  The Communists didn't want to let us leave.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I kept pushing my mother to leave.  I belonged to a
Jewish Zionist movement, B'nai Akivah, which exerted a great deal of
influence over me.  The group taught me to reject Communism and embrace
Zionism.

They made me long to go to Palestine.

This was a trend among all the Jews.  There was always that lingering
fear-that they would once again persecute the Jews.

We didn't want what had happened once to happen again.

Three years after the end of the war, the man who official Nuremberg
records claimed had been dead for two years was still living at the
Fischer farm.  Irene, his discontented but dutiful wife, continued to
act the part of the grieving widow.  One day, she even had a funeral
mass said in memory of her "late" husband at the local church.  But as
the terrible decade came to a close, it was becoming more and more
difficult for Mengele's wife to rationalize remaining in her in-laws'
insulated Bavarian town.  Germany was beginning to come out of its own
postwar mourning period.  Lights were turned on at night for the first
time in years.  There were dances and parties.  Irene saw her youth
slipping away, and her marriage increasingly appeared to have been a
foolish and unrewarding venture.

The tension and acrimony in Irene's marriage to Josef dragged on.  They
continued to meet occasionally, but reunions were marred by bitter
arguments and recriminations, smoothed over by temporary
reconciliations.  Both were coming to the realization that they didn't
really know each other.  Mengele's writings suggest he perceived Irene
as superficial, a self-centered "egotist" who was more concerned about
her own pleasure and convenience than his immense suffering.

He seems to have deeply resented her complaints about her life without
a man in the house.  Irene, on the other hand, saw him as irritable and
domineering, as always trying to tell her what to do with her life and
their son.  He could also be jealous and possessive; as his book shows,
he wove paranoid scenarios of Irene's supposed liaisons, inventing
lovers and trysts.  Again and again, he questioned her about her
relations with other men.  The most innocuous encounter she might tell
him about was proof of an adulterous relationship.  There were
instances when his rage was so overwhelming, she thought him
unbalanced.

The obsessive qualities Mengele had exhibited throughout his adult life
had no release at the farm.  In medical school, and later at Auschwitz,
Mengele was able to throw himself into his work, becoming engrossed in
the most minute details of a test or an experiment.  His fanaticism,
the long hours he spent at the laboratory, and the fastidious way he
performed his work, had earned him praise and admiration.  But now,
there was only his marriage to occupy his troubled mind.

It is by way of his autobiographical "novel" that Mengele provides the
most truthful insights into his disintegrating relationship with
Irene.

While hiding behind a fictional protagonist, Andreas, Mengele says
much about himself as a husband, a lover, and a man.

In the novel, Andreas, a man in hiding, is driven to the verge of
madness when he learns that his wife, Irmgard, is going on holiday to
a Bavarian resort.  Convinced she is planning to meet her lover, he
pleads with her not to go.  When he hears she has gone despite his
entreaties, he decides he must join her there.  Friends try to dissuade
him from undertaking the foolish journey.  They warn him of the
extraordinary risks he is taking; he is, after all, a wanted man.

Crazed with jealousy, Andreas goes anyway, determined to save his
marriage, "this last remnant of my crumbling life."  After a long,
tiresome train journey, during which he reflects on his failed
marriage, the hero goes to the inn where Irmgard is staying.  She has
already left by the time he gets there, but he continues the chase in
the hope of catching her with her lover.  But when Andreas does meet up
with her, Irmgard is alone.  There is no other man.

In real life, Mengele's extreme jealousy appears to have extinguished
whatever feeling remained between him and Irene.  For Mengele, it had
been a marriage of vanity.  He had seen in the tall, lissome blonde the
female embodiment of the Aryan ideal.  Irene had been much more
romantic.  She had fallen deeply in love with the handsome Josef.  But
now she longed for a conventional life with a home, children, and a
husband she could depend on to be there.  "I am not an old soldier's
wife-almost all the men in our circle of acquaintances are back home
again.  But you cannot come home," Irene's alter ego, Irmgard, says at
one point.

In the novel, the alpine reunion proves to be a complete letdown.

Although Andreas and Irmgard do spend the night together, it is
"disappointing."  Mengele the novelist spares us the details, saying
only,

"The night brought the realization he [Andreas] had long suspected but
had not wished to accept: the marriage was over.

Elsewhere, Andreas sadly observes that "with the Third Reich, my
marriage also ended."  What Josef failed to see was that not only his
marriage but also the life he had dreamed of effectively ended with the
fall of Hitler.  The Mengele family remained loyal to Josef and to his
version of events.  Mengele's father and brothers steadfastly refused
to believe the stories that were being told about their beloved
Beppo.

They closed ranks behind Mengele out of a combination of familial duty
and genuine affection for the man they had known only as genial,
carefree, and utterly endearing.  But his family's loyalty and concern
could only help Mengele survive in obscurity.  His hopes for a
brilliant future were dashed.

In a bizarre fashion, Auschwitz had damned Dr.  Mengele almost as much
as it had the poor Jews he had slaughtered.  Mingled with the remains
of the innocent men, women, and children he had dispatched to the
crematorium were the ashes of his own ambitions.  In destroying them,
he had destroyed himself.  Yet even now, he did not realize that he
would never lead the honorable life he had hoped for, never enjoy the
respect he believed he deserved.

He could not see that his life was Over: that the postwar world would
have no place for old die-hard Nazis.  Although he was a war criminal
wanted by several countries for mass murder, in between his bouts of
despair, he kept hoping he would be called back into the world of
academia.  It is ironic that this devotee of Darwin failed to heed the
master's central lesson: Only those who adapt to change survive.

The years at the Fischer farm passed slowly.  Mengele's tedium was
relieved only by the visits of family members, or furtive trips to
Autenried to see his wife and young son.  Lonely and restless, Mengele
decided he was tired of being a farmhand and fugitive, and that he
needed a change of life.  He had heard that Nazis were honored and
respected citizens in some South American countries, especially
Argentina.  The Argentine strongman Juan Peron was known to be a great
admirer of Hitler's Reich.  A new future beckoned.

ZYL THE SAILOR: An underground Jewish organization arranged for my
twin brother and me to escape to Palestine.  We sailed on a ship manned
by Jewish soldiers of the British Army.  It was a very small ship, and
there were hundreds of Jews on it.  The British did not want any more
Jewish refugees in Palestine.  Our boat was stuck in the port of Haifa
for two months.

Finally, they let us disembark.  It was the last ship of Jews the
British allowed into Palestine before they began sending the refugees
to Cyprus instead.

ALEX DEKEL: I learned that we had been intercepted by two British
warships that insisted upon escorting their ship to Cyprus.  If the
captain refused, they threatened to open fire.  In Cyprus, we were
treated decently, fed, and given medical attention.  One day, a young
man, hardly much older than I, spoke to me and told me he was a member
of the Haganah.

He whispered that I should be prepared to escape from Cyprus that
night.  The Haganah had been secretly smuggling physicians and young
men out of the camps and smuggling them into Palestine.  Around 3:00
A.M. he woke me and whispered that we should now make a run for it; we
had to reach a motor launch that lay off the beach about a mile down
the coastline from the encampment.  I was to leave my belongings and
never look back.  I ran for my life in that darkness of the early
morning.

But there was no gunfire.  The British didn't know of our plans and
departure.  I slipped through an opening that had been cut through the
wire fencing surrounding the camp.  It reminded me of the other
fences-electrified-at Auschwitz.  I ran along the beach and tried not
to remember the many people I had seen deliberately reaching for that
other camp's fence, instantly ending their existence.

Some miles off the coast of Palestine, all of us transferred to a
flotilla of small rubber rafts, to escape detection by the British.  We
rowed these to within half a mile of land, took off our clothes, and
swam the rest of the way.  Exhausted, I collapsed onto the beach
without papers, belongings, and clad only in soaked undershorts.  But I
was home.

I was officially accepted into the Haganah, and it was this event that
made my survival at Auschwitz worthwhile.  Now I had a purpose in life
again; a State to be settled, fought for, cherished.

EVA MOZES: In May 1948, Israel became a country.  What a wonderful
feeling!  I said to myself,

"I wish my parents could have lived to see this."

A Jewish state had only been a vague dream for them.  My father had
been an ardent Zionist, but he had talked about a Jewish homeland as if
it were a fantasy that could never come true.

At the same time, life in Romania was becoming so difficult, we decided
to try to emigrate to Israel.  We applied for visas.

But the Israeli government would only grant my sister and [me] the
necessary papers-they didn't want to give visas to my aging aunt and
uncle.  And the Romanian government didn't want to let Miriam and [me]
out-althongh they were perfectly prepared to let my aunt and uncle
leave.  Young people are always in demand.  Old people, nobody wants.

But Miriam and I did not want to be separated from our only living
relatives.  By now, we considered ourselves a family.

LEA LORINCZI: The Communists did not want me to leave Romania.  They
called me to their party office and said,

"Why do you want to go to Palestine?

You can stay here and you can be anything you want to be."

They promised me the world-a brilliant future under the Communist
leadership.  But my father, his new bride, and my twin brother,
Menashe, were determined to move to Israel.

I told the Communists,

"After what I went through, I would never live apart from my
family-never, never.

Although his marriage had collapsed, Mengele still expected his wife
and son to accompany him to South America.  The man who had always been
obsessed with the trappings of success, with style over substance,
evidently could not bear to think he had failed as a husband.

He chose instead to speculate that Irene secretly believed the stories
circulating about his actions in the war.  "There are people in her
circle of acquaintances who wish to convince her of my guilt," Andreas
says of his wife in the fictionalized memoirs.  "We must get through
the present and start over abroad."

But Irene was apparently motivated by other considerations than whether
or not her husband was a mass murderer.  As much as she hated Gunzburg,
she knew Argentina would have even less to offer.

For the cosmopolitan Irene, who in her youth had treasured visits to
Paris and Florence, the notion of residing so far away from her beloved
Europe was simply unthinkable.  The professor's daughter craved a
cultured society she doubted would be available to her in South
America.  She categorically refused to accompany her husband, and began
instead to plan her own return to her native Freiburg.

Mengele was floored by Irene's adamant refusal to move, and tried
repeatedly to convince her to change her mind.  In the novel, Andreas
expressed shock and dismay over lrmgard's insistent demands for a
divorce that would allow her to rebuild her life.  "Man, woman, and
child are a unit that one must not destroy," he sternly observes.  The
admonition falls on deaf ears-Irene's as well as Irmgard's.

But even the prospect of a solitary life was not enough to deter
Mengele from leaving Germany.  He missed his work and hoped that in
Argentina he could resume his scientific career-perhaps even continue
the research on twins.  He had apparently not forgotten his children of
Auschwitz.  His first concern was getting out of the country without
being caught.

PETER SOMOGYL: As we became more involved in the Zionist movement, my
brother and I decided we had to move to Israel.  Since there was no way
of leaving Hungary legally, we decided to escape.  We would sneak out
with our Zionist group.

To plan his escape, Mengele turned as always to his family for help.

He bid good-bye to the Fischers, thanking them for their hospitality
these many years.  At least one member of the family was deeply
relieved.  According to an interview he gave years after the war had
ended, Alois, the farmer's brother who had never liked or trusted
Mengele, was glad the Nazi was going to look for another hideout.

In 1948, Mengele returned to Gunzburg to plan his getaway.  But instead
of being allowed to live in the family villa, he was reduced to
spending several months hiding out in the woods near the old town.

His family gave him whatever he needed to be comfortable, even as they
arranged his safe exit from Germany.  Although they loved their Beppo,
the Mengeles saw the need of getting him speedily out of the country.

They, too, could do without the tension and danger of harboring a war
criminal.

Mengele needed identity papers, yet despite their wealth and influence,
the Mengeles didn't have easy access to forged documents.

Irene finally managed to get her husband a passport on the black
market, but it was of such poor quality that it was quickly
discarded.

Mengele had nO choice but to try to undertake the journey without any
papers.

PETER SOMOGYL: My twin and I fled Hungary with the Zionist movement on
April 4, 1949.

Our flight was very well organized.  There were about ten young people
in our group, as well as a few parents.  We had guides at every stage
of our journey.  These guides had been well-paid.  In those days, there
were a lot of people who made their living sneaking people out of
Europe.

The border guards had been bribed, so we were able to cross without any
problems.  But instead of going directly south, we went up north
through Czechoslovakia, and then on to Vienna.

In Vienna, we had to bribe Russian soldiers to pass through.  The city
was then under Russian control.  We stayed in an old schoolhouse, where
we were joined by scores of other Jews trying to flee.

We spent three weeks in Vienna, and then made our way to Salzburg.  In
Salzburg, we stayed in an old concentration camp, I don't know which
one.  I didn't care-and surprisingly, I didn't feel particularly
bothered by that.  We didn't spend too much time there.

After about a week, we went to Ban, in southern Italy.  There, it was
very easy to move around: Everyone accepted bribes.  They let us go
through even though not one of us had passports.

We waited for the boat that was to take us to Israel.  There were
hundreds of us by then, gathered from every corner of Europe awaiting
passage to the Promised land.

We were all very excited.  We felt for the first time that we didn't have
to look behind our back and hear someone saying "dirty Jew."

Mengele hired several guides to help him with his escape.  He began by
taking a train to lnnsbruck.  Once there, he went to the Brenner Pass,
a route that led into Italy through the Alps.  He reached the border
that divides Austria and Italy on Easter Sunday, 1949.  A guide helped
him across the mountainous terrain, and the two made the crossing in
the dead of night.  In Mengele's thinly disguised account of his flight
from Germany, he describes the difficulty of the crossing.

His paid companion, noticing he is huffing and puffing, asks if he is
strong enough to continue on foot.  The hero, somewhat mortified,
replies that he is in "top physical shape."

Mengele's novel provides a surreal, even poetic rendition of the
flight, from a description of the moon in its first quarter to the
edelweiss and primroses dotting the Alps.  Throughout his account of
Andreas's life, Mengele veers from the dry and factual rendition of
events to long passages in which the hero's sensitive and artistic
sensibilities are paraded.  Even at Auschwitz, the SS doctor had loved
to show off his cultured side, whistling the tunes of the great
composers as he sent inmates to the gas chambers.  Perhaps to refute
his monstrous postwar image, Mengele's writings always highlighted his
appreciation of beauty, music, and art.  It is almost as if he
anticipated his reader critics of the future, and wanted to reveal his
"true" nature.

Once Andreas is near the border, his guide leaves him to fend for
himself.  He continues walking until he reaches Italy, and boards a
train to Sterzing, where another guide is to meet him.  With time on
his hands, he checks into the Golden Cross Inn and nervously awaits his
contact.  He keeps glancing around for any suspicious characters who
might be tailing him, and is especially afraid of running into
Americans.  But everything goes as planned, and an Italian with the
code name

"Nino" arrives to meet him.

The fugitive spends approximately one month at the Golden Cross Inn.

Yet another contact comes to take his photograph, and returns with an
expertly forged German ID card.  Armed with this document, Andreas can
now proceed safely to his next stop, Genoa, where he will try to get
the additional papers he needs to leave Europe.

In writing the "novel" of his escape, Mengele certainly had literary
pretensions, but the only evidence of artfulness would appear to be his
change of place names and individuals.  Historians who have tracked the
war criminal's path out of Europe found that Mengele did indeed acquire
an ID card from a town in the South Tyrol called Taormino.

The document was made out to

"Helmut Gregor," a pseudonym Mengele would use for years to come.

The Tyrol, located between Austria and Italy, had a heavily Germanic
population.  It had long been a point of contention between Italy and
Germany.  When Italy fell to the Nazis in 1943, the Germans moved in
and promptly issued their own identity cards.  But after the war,
inhabitants of the Tyrol were designated as "stateless" by the
International Red Cross because of the unresolved dispute over
sovereignty.  The confusion was beneficial to Metigele, who was able
to obtain an International Red Cross ID card very easily.  Thanks to
this card, he would later be able to obtain the Swiss passport that
would enable him to leave Europe and enter South America safely and
legally.

HEDVAH AND LEAK STERN: When we left Eastern Europe for Palestine, we
went from one war to another war, from the Nazis and the Communists
straight into the arms of the Arabs.

We sailed to Haifa from Marseilles in 1948.  But when we arrived, we
couldn't get in because of the war.  And so we were forced to sail all
around Egypt, to Alexandria and Cairo.

In Alexandria, the Arabs learned there were Jews on the boat.  They
wanted to board and kill us all.  We had to stay locked up inside our
cabins for fear of being slaughtered by the Egyptians.  The captain
told all the passengers that as long as we stayed locked up, he would
protect us.  But if we dared to venture out-even to the deck-he could
not be responsible for our safety.

We continued sailing around the Levant.  We went to Beirut, back to
Egypt, and finally to Haifa, which allowed us to enter.

We had expected to find the "land of milk and honey, "-but there was no
milk and no honey, only more war.

We were placed in an orphanage for girls in Tel Aviv, where they found
us jobs in a factory.  The fighting made us very nervous.  There were
no shelters.  These were hard times.

We were happy to be in Palestine, of course.  But together with the
happiness was a deep sense of sadness, of mourning for everyone who
wasn't here with us.

We were alone, the two of us, in a strange country.  We felt very
broken down.  We longed for a family.

Before Mengele left Sterzing for Genoa, his old Gunzburg chum Hans
Sedlmeier canLe to see him with news from the family.  Karl Mengele,
who had finally been released from the internment camp, sent money to
help his prodigal son get through the difficult weeks and months
ahead.

Mengele Sr.  still doted on his oldest boy.  He didn't want his son to
lack for anything while on the run.  And throughout the years to come,
it would be Josefs father-using Sedlmeier as a preferred
intermediary-who saw to it that the war criminal was well cared-for in
his exile.

A benevolent, even humanitarian, streak was surfacing in Karl
Mengele.

Perhaps it had always been there.  For not only did he take care of
Josef, he also became Gunzburg's favorite and most generous
philanthropist.  After the death of his parsimonious wife, Karl Sr.

sponsored many charity fund-raisers.  He got into the habit of placing
large sausages in the windows of the 'homes of Gunzburg's impoverished
residents.  And long after World War II, when the Mengele name had come
to symbolize evil the world over, the death-camp doctor's father was
the most venerated and venerable man in his town.

That he was Gunzburg's largest employer certainly did not hurt his high
standing.  But Karl Mengele clearly possessed a munificent spirit.  It
harkened back to the early years when he had sought to give his sons
cars and fine clothes over his wife's objections and contrary to her
penurious inclinations.  In the past, he had had to keep his generosity
in check to avoid enraging Walburga.  But now, she was no longer around
to raise a fuss.  More important, the elder Mengele shrewdly recognized
how useful it was to appear civic-minded, if only to counter the
barrage of negative publicity about Josef that persisted through the
years.

Although Sedlmeier had been Jose s childhood friend and schoolmate, it
was out of respect for the elder Mengele that he devoted so much of his
energy to aiding his war-criminal son.  Years after Karl Sr.  died,
Sedlmeier continued to keep a watchful eye on Josef, visiting him
regularly in his South American hideouts and making sure he had money
to live on.

For their Italian reunion at the inn, Sedlmeier brought, in addition to
cash and family greetings, another wonderful surprise: a package
containing scientific slides Mengele had gathered at Auschwitz and sent
home for safekeeping.  Mengele was delighted.  They would be useful in
the laboratory work he hoped to resume in Argentina.

Carrying the money and his precious box of slides, Mengele proceeded to
Genoa, where he was met by yet another guide-"Kurt" in the novel.

Plump but agile, Kurt was a nervous creature who quickly tired of the
hero's haughty airs and prima donna attitude.  At one point, Andreas
complains that he has not yet explored the lovely Mediterranean city,
or even seen the

"Mare Nostrum," as he pretentiously

"You are not exactly a harmless tourist," he snaps at his emdite
charge.

EVA MOZES: Before we left Romania, Miriam and I wanted to go back to
our native village and visit the cemetery where our grandparents were
buried.  But the villagers were very hostile.  They were attacking
former landowners-and our family had been one of the wealthiest in the
town.  I could not even go back to my village to see it one last
time.

In Genoa, the first order of business was to get Mengele a fake
passport from the Swiss consulate.  The fact that he already had an
International Red Cross ID made this very easy.  The ID card was viewed
as a legitimate document by the Swiss government, which used It as a
basis for giving war refugees legal passports.  Using this route, many
Nazi war criminals were able to exploit the humanitarian instincts of
the International Red Cross and Switzerland to obtain the necessary
documents to flee Europe.  Of course, neither entity knowingly helped
Nazis evade justice.

At the Swiss consulate, Mengele was certain the attractive wide-eyed
clerk was staring at him: Did she recognize him?  Although the woman's
demeanor was professional and she seemed eager to help, Mengele feared
she had guessed his true identity.  Occasionally, she would look up
from her papers and smile at him.  It was an innocent gesture, and
quite possibly due to the fatal attraction Mengele always held for
women.  But it was enough to make the former death-camp doctor lose the
poise and proud manner that had so irritated his Italian guide.

Mengele now sought to get the formalities over with as quickly as
possible.

His worst suspicions seemed confirmed the next day, when Mengele
discovered the passport she had issued him was useless.  Purposely or
unwittingly, the smiling clerk had stamped the date he applied for the
papers on the line marked "expiration date."  This meant the passport
had expired the previous day.  Mengele was sure it was a trick.

But he went back to the consulate and was relieved when another clerk
willingly issued him a valid passport without any questions.

The memory of the consulate clerk haunted Mengele for years
thereafter.

He kept seeing her vague smile, her eyes that seemed to see right
through him.  Over a quarter of a century later, he was able to vividly
conjure her for his novel.

Next came the mandatory physical examination at the harbor.  A Croatian
doctor performed the examinations and administered the required
vaccines.  For a few extra lire, the doctor obligingly backdated the
certificate of innoculation by two weeks, to enable Mengele to obtain
an exit visa.  Mengele had to undergo another physical exam at the
port.  There, he noted the disgusting habits of his professional
colleague.  The Croatian doctor used the same instruments again and
again, paying no heed to the dangers of transmitting infection.

The veteran of Nazi death-camp infirmaries, where knives were used
instead of scalpels and patients were left to shiver and die on bare
planks of wood, was appalled at the lack of sanitation at the port of
Genoa.

The last item Mengele needed to escape was an exit visa.  Mengele's
Genoan contact had planned to bring his application to the attention of
an Italian official known for his kindness toward refugees-especially
those who exchanged money for his favors.  But by a twist of fate, the
man was away on holiday.  Mengele's ship, however, was set to sail in
just three days.  In the novel, the vessel is called the North Queen,
startlingly close to the actual name of the ship Mengele boarded: the
North King.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: It was the great exodus out of Europe.

Mother and I finally got our visas.  We took a train to Constanza, a
port on the Black Sea, and then we boarded a ship.

Thousands and thousands of Jews were using the same route.

EVA MOZES: It took nearly two years, but at last, all of us-my twin
sister, my aunt, my uncle, and I-finally received our visas.  We
quickly made arrangements to sail to Palestine from Constanza.

We started packing furiously.  Tables, beds, clothes!  We were going to
wrap everything we owned and take it with us.

But then we were told we could take only fifty kilos of belongings.

Everything else was to be signed over to the Romanian government.

And then, when we got to the ship, we learned we would only be able to
board with the clothes on our backs.  Our ship was built to hold a
thousand people-instead, three thousand were to be crammed in.

I wore three dresses, one on top of the other.  Miriam, too.

We had come back from the camps with nothing, four years before, and
now we were leaving with nothing.

In the novel, Andreas awkwardly tries to slip the official in charge
of granting exit visas twenty thousand lire.  But the functionary will
not be bribed, and starts questioning Andreas closely.  When Andreas
tells him he is from a small town in the South Tyrol, he is openly
skeptical.  With a flick of the wrist, the official dispatches Andreas
to jail.

In real life, Josef Mengele did spend several weeks inside a Genoa
prison-the only punishment he ever received for his murderous deeds.

The man who once condemned thousands to a fate far worse than an
Italian prison cell felt he would go mad.  He paced up and down, raging
like a wild animal, according to his novel.  Gone was the controlled
camp doctor who calmly went about his duties sending people to die with
a smile.  At no point did it occur to him that his imprisonment might
be a punishment for his Auschwitz crimes.  Indignation, not remorse,
was Dr.  Mengele's only emotion.

In an ironic turn of events, several of Mengele's prison peers were
drug addicts and cripples and a host of other "inferior beings" whom he
would have swiftly dispatched to die in the crematoriums-or to be
tortured in his laboratory-in former years.  There was a dwarflike,
handicapped street musician and a doctor who was a morphine addict.

When the doctor began showing withdrawal symptoms, shaking and crying
until he cut himself breaking a window.  Mengele watched and didn't
even try to help.  The addict was simply another defective human being
responsible for his plight, not worthy of care or compassion.

The weeks Mengele remained in jail seemed an eternity.  But at last,
the friendly Italian bureaucrat his contact had tried to reach earlier
returned from his holiday.  Apprised of the situation, he quickly set
Mengele free-and even apologized to the war criminal.  Mengele was able
to board the ship whose sailing had somehow been miraculously
delayed.

Thanks to the corrupt official, his ticket was even upgraded from
tourist to second class: This was just a small way the Italian
government showed how sorry it was for Mengele's unfortunate
detention.

Mengele's escape from Europe belies all the exotic theories that
existed for years on how the Angel of Death had eluded capture.  There
was no sophisticated Nazi network in operation to ferret him out to
safety.  He was not aided by the American government or any of its
intelligence agencies.  The Vatican had no apparent role in his
flight.

Like so many other war criminals, Mengele simply paid a series
of accomplices with no particular affiliation and took advantage of the
International Red Cross.

In chaotic postwar Europe, with thousands of refugees and displaced
persons in need of false papers, there were many men like Nino and Kurt
around willing to help-for a fee.  Even the high-level Italian official
who released Mengele from jail was probably not linked to any nefarious
underground Nazi brotherhood.  Rather, he was simply used to getting
paid generously for his services.  Ultimately, petty corruption inside
the Italian bureaucracy was what saved Dr.  Mengele, even after he'd
finally been caught and placed behind bars.

By the time Mengele set sail for Argentina, he was no longer quite as
confident as when he'd first made the decision to leave Germany.

In the course of the long transatlantic voyage, he learned it was not
going to be easy to start anew.  His German credentials were not enough
for him to practice medicine in Argentina: He would need to get
recertified, a process that meant going through school again, possibly
for many years.

Yet when the North King sailed into the bustling harbor of Buenos
Aires, Mengele felt some of his old optimism and boyish excitement
return.  It was that feeling of endless possibilities that had graced
his youth in Gunzburg, rekindled by the charm of the new land, a sense
of hope as heady as the scent of a summer night on the Plaza.

EVA MOZES: It was early in the morning when our ship approached
Haifa.

We watched the sun rise over Mount Carmel.  It was one of the most
beautiful sights I had ever seen.

Most everyone on the boat was a Holocaust survivor.  We all stood up
and started singing

"Hatikvah," the Jewish national anthem.

We hugged and kissed each other.  We felt at last we had come home.

seven.

FUGITIVE'S IDYLL VERA GROSSMAN.

After leaving our parents, Olga and I were taken to a convalescent home
in Ireland.  It was located in an old castle, not far from Dublin.

It was a beautiful castle-really beautiful-just like in the movies.  It
even had a moat.

There were fields all around, miles and miles of green fields.  I
remember picking wild apples from trees, and strawberries from
strawberry fields.  I had never tasted strawberries before.

They fed us constantly.  After the war, my sister and I were skinny and
undernourished.  We had problems with our lungs.  I became very
friendly with the cook.  She was a big fat woman, and I remember
hugging her, and clinging to her apron.

I loved being inside the kitchen, loved the way it smelled.  All my
life I had been hungry, and for once I was getting more than enough to
eat.

Many of the other children there were Holocaust survivors.  Some had
spent the war in hiding.  Olga and I were quite popular.  We were
nicknamed "the twins."

I got a reputation as a real mischief-maker.  I led the other
children.

At night, we would put sheets over our heads and wander around the
castle, making believe we were ghosts.

I remember feeling very happy there.  It was a carefree, idyllic
period.

In Buenos Aires, Mengele discovered a metropolis that was thoroughly
Latin American, yet longed to be European.  Although smaller than Sao
Paulo and less attractive than Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires was
unquestionably the capital of South America, the city that had the most
to offer.

Cafes lined the wide avenues, as in Rome and Paris.  Late at night, one
could amble through the streets and hear faint strains of jazz or the
samba.  The cabarets were crowded every night with bejeweled young
women and their wealthy escorts.

Reigning over them was the charismatic Juan Peron, a dictator's
dictator, with a movie-star smile and an iron-clenched fist, ruthless
and charming.  Peron was the embodiment of machismo-yet he worshiped
only one woman, his wife, Eva.

During the seven years they were married, Evita was seen everywhere,
discussing military strategy with the generals, whispering to Juan at
state meetings, helping him to make policy decisions, presiding over
groundbreaking ceremonies for charitable institutions, and, after a
long day, idly smoking a cigarette in a nightclub where she had once
been a chorus girl.  Peron, shrewd politician that he was, realized
that his wife was one of his best assets in retaining control over the
fickle Argentinian population.  Evita was adored, a mythical creature,
enshrined even before her premature death.

Of course, Evita had her critics, including the American diplomats who
thought her a hindrance, and maybe even a threat, to Peron's power.

But Peron shrewdly disregarded the Americans' opinion.  He had his
gripes with a country that persisted in calling him a closet Nazi even
though, as he never tired of reminding them, in the late 1940s he was
welcoming more Jewish immigrants than the United States.  As for the
Nazis he allowed to immigrate to Argentina, he argued that letting them
in was yet another demonstration of his humanitarian bent.  Juan Peron
would not turn anyone away.  Thanks to him, Argentina was a haven for
all war refugees, Jewish or Nazi, fleeing Europe in the late 1940s and
early 1950s.

Concentration-camp guards and their victims alike were drawn to
Argentina for its Western charm and culture and, more significantly,
its open-door policy.  Nazi war criminals fled their old homes.

Jewish survivors sought new homes to replace the ones they had lost.

They knew that Peron would not tolerate any displays of
anti-Semitism.

The two did not mix, although Nazis did occasionally frequent
Jewish-owned shops.  Both groups discovered large communities of their
compatriots who had been in Argentina for years.  Even before the war,
Jews had flocked to Argentina-one of the few countries that allowed
them in-and had built a cohesive community.

Similarly, thousands of Germans had emigrated to Argentina, beginning a
century before, in search of better economic opportunities than those
available in Europe.  They founded German clubs, German schools, German
shops, and-most tantalizing for Mengele-a German hospital, which served
as a symbol of what his future would hold if he flourished in the New
World.  And there were also several Nazi organizations that pledged
loyalty to the Reich and the Fuhrer even years after the war was
over.

Endemic to the community was a strong nostalgia, a heartfelt longing
for their homeland that underscored every activity.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: Mother regretted leaving Romania.  She disliked Israel
from the moment we set foot on the ground: she said it reminded her of
Auschwitz.

When we arrived, we were taken to a refugee camp in Atlit.  We lived
not in houses, but in tents.  The country was very poor.  Whatever you
needed to live-bread, milk, eggs-had to be purchased with coupons.

Life was very hard.

In our camp, there were a lot of immigrants from Asia and North
Africa.

The men walked around all day in their pajamas-striped pajamas.  At
Auschwitz, male inmates had also worn striped uniforms that looked a
lot like these pajamas.  That's what reminded Mother of the
concentration camp.

"This is like Auschwitz," Mother would say.

MOSHE OFFER: When I arrived in Israel, all the children I had traveled
with had someone they could go to-a cousin, an uncle, a friend.  I had
nobody.

I was placed in an orphanage.  I was the only Holocaust victim there,
and it was very hard for me.  On the weekends, the children went home
to their relatives.  I was left all by myself I was very jealous of the
other children.  When the weekend was over, they returned with care
packages and pocket money given to them by their families.  They could
buy themselves little treats, go to the movies.  But I had no money at
all.

I lived from hand to mouth.  Sometimes, I would sneak into the
cinema.

If I was caught, the ushers or the owner would beat me up and throw me
out.

These were very hard times, and I was extremely depressed.  I felt
completely alone.

Sometimes, they would close the kitchens.  Since I always felt hungry,
I picked through the garbage for food to eat.

Restaurants in the German-Argentine community disdained the local
cuisine, favoring beer over fruit juice and serving schnitzel rather
than the ubiquitous steaks.  An old Victrola cranked out nostalgic
songs from before the war a famous lied, perhaps, or a patriotic German
anthem.  Clusters of old men sat around recalling the days when it
seemed certain that Germany would rule the world.  Discussions
invariably returned to the empire they had lost.  Such conversations
made these defeated soldiers of the Reich much less gloomy.  They spent
their days in cozy establishments that bore a striking resemblance to
the restaurants and beer halls of Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin.

For the wealthier, more cosmopolitan Germans, Buenos Aires was a
favorite city, a place that offered some relief from the arid drudgery
of the South American hinterland.  Its natives were also more
sophisticated, and there was some social mixing of the Germans with the
Argentine upper classes.  Wealthy Argentines rivaled the Germans in
their tastes and snobbish sense of superiority.  There was also a deep
and pervasive anti-Semitism among the Argentine elite that was
attractive to Nazi immigrants.  But as long as Juan Peron was in power,
these anti-Semitic sentiments were not allowed to go beyond the
priVate drawing rooms of Argentina's upper crust.

At first, Mengele's world was far removed from Argentine-or German-high
society.  He arrived in Argentina penniless, the money his father had
sent him via Sedlmeier having been used up during his Genoa
adventures.

A German contact who was supposed to meet Mengele at the boat's landing
never showed up.

EVA MorEs: When we stepped off the boat in Haifa, an uncle was waiting
for us.

He hugged us.  He said he wished our parents had left Cluj and settled
in Palestine before the war, as he had done.  Then they would have been
with us, instead of gassed in a German concentration camp.

But Mother had said no.  We were leading a good life in Eastern
Europe.

She had heard conditions in Palestine were too "primitive," especially
for raising young children.  She convinced Father to stay put and not
make the family emigrate.

Miriam and I cried in our uncle's arms about those lost years and our
parents tragic mistake.

He took us to a distribution center for immigrants.  A week later, we
were moved to a Youth Aliyah village.  This was a center for children
who were either orphans or whose parents could not take care of them.

These centers had been started in 1934 to rescue children from the
Holocaust.  After the war, they were used to help children who had
survived the concentration camps.

LEA LORINCZI: When we arrived in Israel, we were met by my future
husband although of course, I did not know then that we would get
married.

He was my stepmother's brother.

He was very nice.  He arranged it so that we did not have to go to any
refugee camp.  Instead, he got us a room in Jerusalem.  My parents, my
twin brother, and I all lived in that one room.

Mengele was forced to spend his first few weeks in a cramped room in a
fourth-class hotel, one built especially to accommodate the thousands
of refugees who poured in each month from Europe.  The racial hygienist
shared a room with two other people.  He made do with a community
toilet and sink located at the end of the hall.

Mengele could stroll by the elegant cafe's and admire the pretty
women.

In actuality, he was more impressed by Argentina's soldiers than its
women.  In letters composed many years later, Mengele bemoaned the
younger generation of Germans and what he saw as their "cowardly
inferiority complexes."  In Argentina, soldiers and generals were
revered, and showered with status and privilege.  He admired the
respect the country gave to "military tradition," and ruminated sadly
on the fall of the German Army.  He was especially drawn to Juan
Peron's imposing personal guards, who stood on duty outside the Casa
Rosada, the presidential palace.  Despite his poverty, Mengele felt at
home-more so than he had in his own country after the war.

EVA MOZES: I will never forget our first Friday night in the Youth
Aliyah village.

Miriam and I entered the dining room, and we saw everyone wearing
white.  There were candles on the table, and wine.

Children from many different countries were seated together-yet they
were all speaking one language, Hebrew.

We recited prayers and sang Israeli songs.  After the meal, we were
taken to a large room where all the young people were dancing Israeli
folk dances.

They taught us how to dance.  That night, Miriam and I even learned a
few words of Hebrew.

I felt so at home.  I could have stayed at the Youth Aliyah forever.

Mengele had one contact in Argentina other than the person who had not
met him at the dock.  The man was also a doctor, named

"Schott" in the autobiographical novel, and Mengele went to see him
with high hopes.

The encounter was disappointing: The doctor was now employed in a
weaving mill.  The best he could do for Mengele was to get him a job at
his company, combing wool.

Mengele realized that he would not get any work commensurate with his
experience and abilities.  Although the old doctor assured him that
many other prominent ex-Nazis were employed in his firm, the prospect
of such work was depressing to Mengele, and he decided to forgo the
opportunity.  He left intensely discouraged.

PETER SOMOGYL: When we arrived in Israel, it was very hard for any of
us to get jobs to support ourselves.

My father, for instance, who had always been very successful running
his own business, had a hard time trying to reestablish himself He
simply could not make a living.  He was in his late fifties-not a young
man anymore.

When I looked for work after getting out of the Israeli Army, I could
find nothing.  And so I decided to learn a trade.  I became an auto
mechanic.  It was not very Jewish, to learn a trade.  We had always
been brought up to be "professionals."  But I thought it was useful.

I worked as a mechanic for three years.  I was very good with my
hands.

TWINS' FATHER: We arrived in Israel on my wife's birthday.  Luckily, I
was able to quickly find a job in my field, accounting.  I worked for a
large firm.

They let me handle a very glamorous account-one of the largest theaters
in Israel.  I did well, and they came to rely on me.  I kept their
books in tip-top order.  They would deal only with me.

MOSHE OFFER: I was fifteen years old, and still living at the
orphanage, when I got my first job-as a dishwasher at a nearby
restaurant.  I had decided I needed to make money.  I was going to
school, which was expensive.  I went to classes in the morning, then I
would wash dishes in the afternoon to pay for my studies.

I would come home very late from the restaurant, go to sleep, and wake
up early the next morning to go to school.

By chance, Mengele met a carpenter who knew of both a job and a place
to live.  The carpenter was quitting his job and told Mengele he was
welcome to have it.  He then directed Mengele to a small rooming house
in the Vicente I,oPez neighborhood.  The Auschwitz doctor would be
sharing a small, windowless room with an engineer.

But even that was considerably nicer than the fleabag hotel where he
had been living.

In 1949, Mengele began work as a carpenter, presumably a more
respectable and interesting line of work than wool-combing.  The
recipient of a Ph.D. and medical degree discovered he had a knack for
building and fixing furniture.  Little by little, he started
establishing himself.  Then, when his roommate's daughter became sick,
Mengele was asked to treat her-secretly, of course.  Although the
little girl lived with her mother, her anxious father brought her to
Mengele for expert medical care.  Mengele agreed, delighted to be able
to put his medical abilities to use.

LEA LORINCZI: Shortly after we arrived, I decided to study to become a
nurse.  I had decided I wanted to help the sick.  At Auschwitz, a nurse
had saved my life.  She was a Jewish inmate who worked at the infirmary
where they placed me when I got very sick.  If it hadn't been for her,
I would not have survived the concentration camp.

I was only sixteen years old when I began working as a nurse at Shaare
Zedek Hospital, one of Israel's leading medical centers.  I had no
money.  I worked very hard, very long hours.  And I didn't speak a word
of Hebrew.

One of my duties was to prepare basins of water each morning and wash
the patients.  One day, an old woman started crying,

"Hum, hum, hum."

I had no idea what was bothering her.  And then, I realized she was
complaining because the water was scorching her.  Hum was the Hebrew
word for hot.

I began to carry around a little Hebrew-Romanian dictionary in my
pocket.  Whenever a patient said a word I didn't understand, I simply
looked it up.  That's how I learned to speak the language.

EVA MOZES: After a while, Miriam and I were drafted into the army and
had to leave the Youth Aliyah village.  We were both asked what we
wanted to do with our lives.

Miriam immediately asked to serve as a nurse.  I wanted to do that,
too, but our uncle felt it was not good for both of us to be so
alike.

He said,

"Eva, you are good in math-become a draftsman."

MIRIAM MOZES: In Europe, my great dream had been to become a doctor.

But in Israel, I didn't have the money to study medicine-so I became a
nurse instead.

I was offered free room and board in the hospital.  I paid nothing for
my training.

EVA MOrEs: We were separated for the first time at boot camp.  Miriam
went to the hospital to train to become a nurse.  I was sent to work as
a secretary.

The Israeli government had decided it would not train women to be
draftsmen because they would get married and leave their jobs.

Instead, I was only trained to type.

I worked in an office in Tel Aviv.  Miriam lived with other nurses at
her hospital.  It was traumatic.  We had never been apart before.

MIRIAM MOZES: It was very hard to live apart from Eva.  From Auschwitz
until then, I had always had my sister at my side.  She took care of
me.  She was like my mother.

I cried all the time at first.  It took a year before I got used to
being on my own.  I made friends among the nurses.  During holidays,
Eva came to visit me.  We tried to see each other at least once a
week.

When I finished my studies, I went to the director of the hospital and
told him I wanted to share a room with my twin sister.  I told him I
had no parents or brothers or sisters except her-she was my only
surviving relative.  He agreed to let Eva move into the hospital
dormitory.

Mengele began corresponding with his family in Gunzburg, as well as
with his six-year-old son.  Irene had finally left the Gunzburg area
and returned to her beloved Freiburg, taking little Rolf with her.

In 1948, she had become friendly with a businessman from Freiburg,
Alfons Hackenjos, and the two fell in love.  The romantic entanglement
was not unexpected: Irene was tired of the war-widow's life.

Hackenjos, a prosperous shoe-store owner, offered her the companionship
and stability she craved.

Though Mengele's relationship with Irene was over, he had every
intention of keeping up with his ony child.  Mengele's letters to
Rolf, who was growing up into an appealing and bright little boy, were
always signed

"Uncle Fritz."  The child had been told early on that his father had
died in the Russian Campaign-Rolf had no idea Mengele was alive, let
alone that he was one and the same with

"Uncle Fritz."  The letters make clear that Mengele had lost none of
his old flair for captivating small children.  He spun colorful tales
of gauchos, the South American cowboys, recounting their exploits in
raising cattle on the pampas.  Sometimes there were amusing drawings,
or perhaps a poem or a song composed especially for Rolf.  Each time,
there was a big stamp, often with the photograph of Evita Peron, that
Rolf could add to his burgeoning collection.  Argentina assumed
mythical proportions in the mind of Mengele's child.  It seemed
considerably more interesting than his own humdrum Black Forest town.
In Argentina, men who were larger than life daily tried to tame the
wild beasts that roamed the pampas.  And reigning over this magical
kingdom were two people-the lovely blond woman of the stamps and his
own handsome uncle Fritz.  The little boy waited expectantly for the
letters from the amusing, glamorous uncle he thought he had never met,
who lavished such intense affection on him-nearly enough to make up for
the father he had never known.

VERA GROSSMAN: Parents started coming to Ireland within a few months of
our arrival to reclaim their children.  Many families were able to
obtain visas to emigrate from Eastern Europe to Canada and the United
States, and they would stop in Ireland to pick up their daughters.  Our
group in the castle dwindled to less than twenty girls.

Our own mother and stepfather left Eastern Europe for Israel.

After we had gained sufficient strength, Olga and I and the remaining
girls were moved from Ireland to London.  We were placed in the house
of a rabbi and his wife, who had several children of their own.  They
owned a large fourteen-room mansion and could take in a lot of us.  We
attended Avigdor High School, a Jewish school run by Rabbi Schoenfeld,
the man who had plucked us out of our homes in Eastern Europe.

School was wonderful, but the family we lived with was cruel to us.  They
had been paid to take us and the other children in.  But they treated
us like servants.

Both my sister and I missed our mother very much.  And I think the pain
of the separation started to show-especially on Olga.  Even in Ireland,
where we were very well treated, she had begun acting strangely.  She
talked about people trying to hypnotize her.

We tried our best to keep up the correspondence with our mother.

But it was difficult, because as we were becoming more proficient in
English, we were forgetting how to speak Czech.

OLGA GROSSMAN: Because our mother couldn't speak English, we had to
write letters to her in Czech.  It would take us five hours to compose
a single letter.

I remember going to London's West End one day with Vera to purchase a
Czech-English dictionary.  We wrote our letters word by word.  We had
both forgotten our native language.  We understood it, but we couldn't
speak it or write it.

Still, it was very important for us to correspond with our mother.

Mengele faithfully kept up a correspondence with the rest of the
family, which was still mourning the untimely death of Karl Jr.  in
1949 at the age of thirty-seven, after an illness.  Josef's father and
Lolo were now running the firm, with the loyal Sedlmeier acting as
their right-hand man.  Mengele was clearly still loved and remembered
by his relatives in Gunzburg.  They helped him financially as much as
they could-his father even sent him some expensive farm machinery to
start a business.  Josef began selling the equipment, traveling to
neighboring Paraguay, where there was a lucrative market.  He also
invested some of his father's money in a small carpentry business of
his own, which flourished as well.

In the tightly knit German community of Buenos Aires, it was not hard
for Mengele to meet people and establish his impeccable social -and
Nazi-credentials.  It was known that he came from a wealthy family in
Bavaria that was continuing to supply him with money.

Several people knew, and admired, his status as a wanted war criminal
who had been a scientist and doctor in the Third Reich.  Within a
couple of years after his penniless arrival, he was mingling with the
expatriate Nazi society and meeting important war criminals like
himself.

One of these was Wilhelm Sassens, a Nazi wanted for war crimes in
Belgium, who was a journalist for Nazi publications in Argentina.

It was Sassens who introduced Mengele to the man who was to become his
best friend in exile, Colonel Hans Ulrich Rudel.  The World War II
flying ace, who had been the most decorated member of the Luftwaffe, as
well as Hitler's personal pilot, was a devotee of Hitler's ideology
long after the war's end.  He was also a close friend of Juan Peron,
and had helped build up the Argentine Air Force using his expertise
gleaned from the war years.  Through Rudel, Mengele was finally able to
join the elite clique of Germans who enjoyed the confidence of the
Latin dictator.

Mengele was predictably drawn to these men, who were, like himself,
unrepentant Nazis.  Like the old Bourbon kings who had learned nothing
and forgotten nothing, they mourned the fall of Hitler and the Third
Reich.  The specter of a defeated Germany, disgraced in the world, had
not dissuaded them from their faith in the righteousness and
fundamental superiority of the German people.

During World War II, Argentina had been a center of Nazi activity,
giving rise to Allied fears that the Germans might use the country as a
base to expand their power to the Western Hemisphere.  Indeed, since
their settlement in Argentina in the previous century, the Germans had
always believed they were biologically and culturally superior to the
native population.  According to Ronald Newton, a historian who has
studied German culture in Argentina, the Germans felt "a communal
conviction of superiority to the surrounding culture."  The large,
solidly entrenched populace was an ideal target for Nazi prod aganda;
Hitlerian notions of law, order, tradition, and respect for authority
appealed to the German expatriates.

Pro-Nazi publications flourished in South America long after the the
defeat of the German Army.  One of them, the virulently antisemitic Der
Weg, or

"The Way," was popular in the early 1950s.

Sassens was a regular contributor.  In 1953, an article appeared in Der
Weg that dealt with genetics; it was by lined

"G.  Helmuth," a transposition of Josef Mengele?s alias,

"Helmut Gregor."  Three years after arriving in Argentina, Mengele
still felt vulnerable enough to use a pseudonym of his pseudonym.

The article itself was not remarkable.  Intended for the layman, it
explained basic principles of genetics, although Rassenhygien-racial
science-was not mentioned.  In fact, it contained no hint of racism,
fanaticism, or politics.  However, even at the height of the Nazi era,
Mengele's published articles had been distinguished by their lack of
rhetoric.  But because it appeared in the Nazi organ Der Weg, Mengele's
sober, apolitical piece was, by definition, pro-Nazi.

On the other side of the world, Verschuer was far ahead of his old
pupil.  He had mastered the scientific lingo of the postwar
establishment to perfection and was flourishing.  After maintaining a
low profile for several years following the 1946 newspaper revelations
of his scandalous past, Verschuer had finally obtained an appointment
at the University of Munster in 1951.  Mengele's mentor was now
lecturing before packed classrooms at the university.

VERA GROSSMAN: Olga began to constantly black out in class.  Whenever a
teacher asked her a question, she would get panic-stricken and faint.

I managed a little better.  I worked very hard.  Teachers were always
holding up my notebooks and praising me for my neat penmanship.  I won
a handwriting competition two years in a row.

One day, a geography teacher I liked made n of one of my notebooks.

I'm not sure what was wrong, but he held it up in class and ridiculed
it.  Some of the other children started laughing.

I got up from my chair and started running out of the classroom.

I remember running, running out of school.  I was crying
hysterically.

I ran for miles until I got to a park, and I sat there, under a tree,
crying.

A search party from the school found me there.  The geography teacher
came-he apologized to me.

I think it was the first time I cried.  I cried my heart out.  I cried
for all the years I didn't cry.

The next day, I went back to school.  I felt better than before.  From
then on, I cried more often, and much more naturally.  I didn't keep
things bottled up inside of me as much.

But Olga had more and more trouble in class.  It was very humiliating
to her, not to be able to answer the teachers.  She was always so weak
and pale, so timid.  My heart broke for her.

Once installed at Monster, Verschuer set about building the largest
institute for genetic studies in West Germany.  With each passing
year, he felt less cautious about the need for circumspection, and his
old ambition led him to push for recognition from his peers.  Verschuer
was careful to omit any overt reference to racial science from his
lectures or publications.  In the classroom, he focused on geneticsa
field that was eminently respectable.

But Verschuer wasn't entirely discreet.  He served for many years on
the international editorial board of the Mankind Quarterly, a racist
and anti-Semitic publication based in Washington, D.C founded in 1960
by anthropologists who admired the fundamental precepts of Nazi racial
science.  Verschuer also helped other former colleagues from the
Frankfurt Institute attain positions in the mainstream scientific
community.  His former deputy, Heinrich Schade, taught genetics at the
University of Dusseldorf, and also rose in the academic world, although
he never attained the status of Verschuer.  A die-hard racial scientist
long after the fall of the Third Reich, Schade insisted on the need to
create a master race of Aryans by getting rid of "inferior" genetic
stock.

Schade became an adviser and source of inspiration to neo-Nazi
movements.  Despite these unseemly affiliations, he was respected among
colleagues in academia.  He and Verschuer were on the best of terms.

The horror of it all was that postwar Germany embraced both Verschuer
and Schade with open arms.  That one had become relatively discreet,
purposefully keeping the lid on his racial theories, while the other
remained a flagrant and unabashed preacher on the supremacy of Aryan
genetic science, did not matter.  The fact that they both thrived is
one of the most telling points about the culture.  One could soft pedal
one's racial views and publish them only in the obscurity of the
Mankind Quarterly, a continent away, as Verschuer did, or one could
trumpet them from the tallest ivy tower on the campus of the University
of Dusseldorf, as Schade did.  And still, postwar Germany, which could
not have had any illusions about these racial theorists, allowed them
to prosper.  The point was, it did not matter.

One can imagine the burning envy Mengele must have felt at seeing his
old colleagues, one by one, attain the positions he craved.

According to Hans Sedlmeier, Mengele made a secret visit to West
Germany in the early 1950s and made a side trip to see Verschuer.

Perhaps Mengele hoped that his old mentor, who had placed many of his
former colleagues in prestigious positions, could do the same for
him.

There is indeed evidence that even while Mengele was at the Fischer
farm in the years immediately following the war, Verschuer tried to get
him a university job but was unable to do so because of the furor
surrounding his pupil's name.

If, in fact, Mengele and Verschuer renewed their ties with one another,
they did so with utmost secrecy.  Verschuer's son, Helmut, claimed that
his father never once mentioned the notorious young man who had been
his protege for so many years.  Mengele also saw a need to protect his
old professor: Among the hundreds of letters Mengele left behind at his
death that were later released by his son, not one mentions
Verschuer.

Aside from the occasional pang of homesickness, Mengele could not
complain of his life in Argentina.  Although he never penetrated the
scientific establishment or practiced medicine again-legally-he did
well as a businessman.  (There are hints and suggestions he performed
illegal abortions while in Argentina, but few details are available.)
The sales of Mengele farm equipment, his carpentry workshop, and a
generous allowance from his father helped him to lead an increasingly
comfortable life.  The Nuremberg prosecutors had long since returned
home to New York and Washington; several used their prestigious
Nazi-hunting credentials to establish lucrative private law
practices.

The Israelis, involved as they were in building their new country and
fighting wars with the Arabs, had yet to send teams of agents to scour
South America for those war criminals who had escaped justice.  Mengele
could live more or less openly: Several people knew of his real
identity.  His homes became ever more elegant as he moved to more
exclusive neighborhoods.  By moving, he markedly improved his social
status in a city where one's address was a prime indicator of one's
station in life.  In 1954, the Auschwitz doctor bought a house in the
luxurious suburb of Olivos, where many affluent Germans lived.

Shortly thereafter, he purchased another, even more splendid villa in
the same elegant neighborhood.  It was right near Peron's old estate.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: After three months in the refugee camp, Mother and I
were invited to join a kibbutz.  But my mother put her foot down.  She
didn't want a collective life.  She wanted to be on her own.

Together, we moved to Netanya.  The government helped find us a small
apartment.  But we had to face the problem of supporting ourselves.

Mother had never worked before, and I was still in school.

She began earning money doing the one thing she knew how to do:
knitting.  She would knit small dresses for babies and little girls.  I
helped her out.  After school, every afternoon, I came home and helped
Mother knit the dresses.  This was our livelihood.

TWINS' FATHER: I did so well handling the theater's account that one
day its executives asked me to come and work for them as their personal
accountant.  It was a wonderful opportunity-more money, and the chance to
work for a very prestigious outfit.

The theater had three divisions-creative, technical, and financial.

I was put in charge of their financial section, handling all their
accounting.

I got to see all the new plays-that was a great perquisite of the
job.

I tried to forget the Holocaust.  I kept telling myself how lucky I
was.

As Mengele eased into middle age, he seemed to return to the bon vivant
inclinations of his privileged youth.  His clothes were stylishly
tailored, his friends were at the top of Argentine society, and his
income was enough to permit trips throughout the continent and
beyond.

He was overjoyed when he got a driver's license, and bought himself a
sporty new Borgward

Isabel Ia

The pictures Mengele sent home to Gunzburg and to Rolf showed a dapper
gentleman, no longer young, to be sure, but still handsome.

He was quite fit and trim.  There was a jauntiness about him that
neither time nor the ravages of the war and postwar years had quite
managed to erase.  The old sprezzatura was there, too, evident in the
easy, relaxed way in which he posed alongside his shiny new car.

In 1954, Mengele's father came to Buenos Aires to visit his son.  The
reunion was warm, and the elder Mengele gave Josef money to maIntain
his life-style.  Karl Sr.  would eventually give his son a million
marks to purchase half the shares of Fadro Farm, a pharmaceutical
company.

The only bad news Karl brought was that Irene was insisting on a
divorce; the couple had never obtained a legal separation, and now she
wanted to marry Alfons Hackenjos, the staid but kindly Freiburg
businessman she had met years earlier.  Since the time for manhunts in
Germany had long since ended, Mengele could no longer argue that the
family needed to maintain the illusion that he was "dead."

He had no choice but to agree to have the family lawyers back home
prepare the divorce papers.  The couple was divorced that year.

LEA LORINCZI: Even while I worked as a nurse, my family kept talking
about shiddochim -matches-for me.  They were always asking me if I
wanted to get married.  But I did not want to go out with the men they
proposed for me.

I was looking for someone grown-up, whom I could talk to, who would
understand me.  I needed a husband who would be a friend, a father, a
mother.  I did not like the boys my own age.

That's how I became interested in my stepmother's brother.  He was much
older than I was, but I felt I could talk to him.  He asked my father
for my hand, and I accepted.

Although he was still an exile, banished from his home and unable to
resume his profession, his family's concern and generosity helped make
the 19 SOs decidedly good years for Dr.  Mengele.  But when Juan Peron
was ousted in 1955, Nazis as well as Jews panicked: He had protected
both.  The military coup that threw the dictator out of office after
more than twenty years of rule created havoc in the country.  Sure
enough, after Peron was gone, some of the Nazi publications, including
Der Weg, were banned.  Some war criminals felt concerned enough to flee
to other countries.  Egypt, where dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser had
consolidated his hold, was the favorite refuge.

Despite the coup, Mengele felt secure enough to stay on in his adopted
homeland.  Even without the protection Peron had extended to Nazi
fugitives, Mengele believed no one would come after him in Argentina;
he had nothing to fear now.

His belief that he was safe at last was in many ways warranted.  A
decade had passed since the Nuremberg trials, and the hunt for Nazi war
criminals had effectively ended, in Germany as in the rest of the
world.  In fact, many former Nazis were now flourishing in West German
society.  Some of the worst offenders of the Third Reich were leading
comfortable lives, and, indeed, had achieved positions of prominence in
the "new" Germany.  Others, like Mengele, had made new lives for
themselves and their children in South America.

EVA MOZES: For years, Miriam and I struggled and had very little
money.

We had to work a whole month simply to buy one outfit.  We shared
clothes to stretch our wardrobes.

Finally, I was able to save up enough money from my job as a secretary
to buy an apartment.  Miriam moved out of the dormitory to live with
me.

It was a good period.  We bought little pieces of furniture.  We
entertained men.  We felt very grown-up, very independent.

I told her whoever gets married first gets to keep the apartment.

A number of lesser "stars" of the Nazi era who had fled Europe to other
Latin American countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, and Brazil
were now considerably more at ease than they had been at the start of
their exile.  And those who, like Mengele, had remained in Argentina in
spite of the uncertainties were relieved to find the new government was
also willing to provide them with protection.  Throughout Latin
America, war criminals enjoyed the tacit protection of the local
tyrants, who liked to model themselves after the leaders of the Third
Reich.  The more prominent Nazis hobnobbed with the dictators and made
themselves useful by serving as consultants to the military and the
secret police.  The Latin strongmen were delighted to have such
specialists in the arts of repression and brute force available to
them.

One of the most popular Nazi refuges was Paraguay.  Its leader, General
Alfredo Stroessner, structured his army along German lines, infusing
his Guarani Indian soldiers with Teutonic values of discipline and
ruthlessness.  The Paraguayan soldiers were trained in Nazi techniques
by men who were unquestionably experts.

MoSKE OFFER: When I was drafted into the army, I was forced to remember
all I had tried to forget-Auschwitz, the war, the death of Tibi.  All
my past caught up with me.

They tried to teach me how to fight, but I was terrified of bullets.

I was constantly anxious.  I developed severe emotional problems.

I didn't get along with other soldiers.  I was always by myself and the
more time I spent alone, the more I thought about the war.

Finally, I suffered a nervous breakdown.

In many ways, 1956 was a watershed for Mengele, the year he "came
out."

He was tired of posing as Helmut Gregor; he wanted to be Dr.  Mengele
again.  Sometime that year, he had his name legally changed from Helmut
Gregor to Josef Mengele.  The name change required him to admit that he
had been living under a false alias.  He marched into the German
embassy and requested a new passport, to be made out under his own
name.  Years later, when the hunt for Mengele would begin in earnest,
his 1956 passport photograph would be the only authentic clue the world
had as to how the Angel of Death of Auschwitz really looked.

In Germany, Rolf received pictures of his "uncle" looking more handsome
and distinguished than ever.  The young boy was filled with admiration
for his faraway relative, and longed to meet him.

OLGA GROSSMAN: Our mother suffered very much during the years we were
away in England-she missed us terribly.  We lived apart for nearly six
years.

Dr.  Shoenfeld would send messengers to Israel, who gave her news about
how we were doing and assured her we were fine.  But that obviously
wasn't enough.

We stayed on, and kept hoping that next year we would be in Israel with
our mother.  Year after year passed, and we waited and we hoped.

VERA GROSSMAN: One day, we heard our mother was very sick.  She thought
she was going to die and was asking for us.

Ourstepfather's business had collapsed, and Mother was very afraid she
couldn't feed the children.  She had four babies-two born in
Czechoslovakia and two in Israel.

She wanted to see us-she said her last wish before she died was to have
her twins by her side.

OLGA GROSSMAN: We were told we were to be sent home to Israel.  We were
so excited.

Israel meant love, caring-it meant being reunited with our mother
again.

His identity and sense of respectability regained, Mengele also longed
for a reunion with his son in Germany.  Rolf was now a handsome boy of
twelve or thirteen, still unaware of the fact that he had a living
father.  The Mengele family, which had stood by Josef through these
difficult years, decided to help bring them together.  It was the
trusted Sedlmeier who played the key role in working out the
logistics.

He personally went to Freiburg to escort the excited little boy to
Switzerland for what was to be a special winter holiday.

In Engelberg, a small, exquisite ski resort high in the Swiss Alps,
Rolf met his cousin Karl Heinz and his beautiful aunt Martha, the widow
of Josef's brother, Karl.  Standing next to the two was

"Uncle Fritz,"

looking even more dashing in person than in his photographs.

The hotel that was selected for this momentous occasion was the best
the Mengele family could afford-an elegant Old World establishment
where Queen Victoria herself had once stayed.  For the first time ever,
Rolf received pocket money-compliments of Uncle Fritz.

As lavish meals topped off with spectacular desserts were brought to
his uncle's room by deferential servants, Mengele's child was
absolutely beside himself with joy, a grown-up Rolf would later
admit.

VERA GROSSMAN: When we got home, we were shocked to find there was
nothing to eat -our family was extremely poor.

I remember the Friday night dinner after we arrived.  Mother opened a
can of sardines-each of us got one ha If of a sardine.  And then there
was some sort of thin bean soup.  This was our first Sabbath meal at
home.

It was a magical holiday.  The best times were early in the morning and
late at night, when Rolf got to crawl into bed with his "uncle" and was
regaled with war stories about the Russian front and more tales of
gauchos in South America.  For the brief period they were together,
Mengele showed himself to be a wonderful companion.

Indoors, Mengele was a spellbinding storyteller.  And outside, he
showed himself in excellent form on the slopes.  Rolf, who had not been
told the truth and had no idea the wonderful visitor from South America
was his father, was bursting with pride.  As might be expected of a
young, fatherless boy, he was utterly beguiled by his handsome uncle
Fritz.

Those few days at Engelberg bought the old Nazi his fiercest, most
devoted ally.  Like the twins, Rolf never forgot Mengele.  But Rolf's
memories were of laughter on the ski runs, of chilly mornings when he
padded over to Mengele's room and snuggled next to him under the great
eiderdown quilt.  Mengele was warm, playful, and loving toward him
throughout the brief holiday.

Even as an adult, after he was made aware of charges that

"Uncle Fritz," his father, had been a cold-blooded killer, Rolf Mengele
could never get over that admiration bordering on hero worship.  In
interviews with the press, he sought to conceal such feelings.  He
suggested he accepted the veracity of the stories about Dr.  Mengele.

But it was clear he could not help loving the man who had haunted his
childhood.

Rolf always saw his father through the prism of his old letters, the
brightly colored stamps, and the photographs that had enlivened his
Black Forest childhood.

Years later, as a lawyer with his own private practice, Rolf would
cling to legal principles that would help his father's "case."  In law
school, he was taught that a man was innocent until proven guilty.

And guilt could not be determined until a trial was held.  This
circular thinking provided a convenient rationale for him to defend his
father.

For, of course, there had never been a trial of Josef Mengele-witnesses
had never been able to submit their painful testimony before a court of
law.  When asked whether he felt his father should have been punished
for his deeds, Rolf Mengele always answered with perfect equanimity,
"If he was guilty."  What lay underneath the impeccable legal stance
had nothing to do with the law: It was the love a son felt for a
father, even a father accused of heinous war crimes.

Rolf later found himself yearning for that brief childhood holiday.

"It was my best vacation ever," he said nearly twenty years later.  "I
had .  . . other uncles, but none of them were as nice as this
one,"

he told journalists.  When it was revealed in 1985 that Josef Mengele
was dead, it was Rolf, alone among the Mengeles, who told the world the
"true story" of his father's life.

That story was not about sadism and bestiality.  It was not a portrait
of a pathological killer.  Rather, Rolf released old family pictures
that showed Mengele appearing kindly and benevolent, his arms around
his son, on the slopes with Karl Heinz, and embracing Aunt Martha.

In other, older photographs, young Beppo cycled merrily about the
Bavarian countryside in knickers and an overcoat.  There was nothing in
the mountain of innocuous letters, sentimental notes, pictures, and
poems that Rolf released that shed any light on his father's crimes,
nothing that mentioned the death camp.  Indeed, the son paid little
attention to his father's crimes at Auschwitz, acknowledging only
reports that they had occurred.  Rolf did say his father had sworn to
him he had never killed anyone "personally."

If SS doctor Josef Mengele had needed a lawyer to defend him after he
died, he could not have retained anyone more quietly eloquent, more
gently persuasive than his own son.  For no amount of Mengele money
could buy the motivation his love for

"Uncle Fritz" had given Rolf.

The Switzerland vacation over, father and son went their own separate
ways, the father to his life in Buenos Aires, the child to school in
Freiburg.  After Mengele's return to Argentina, many more letters
flowed back and forth between him and Rolf.  The young boy continued to
believe he was corresponding with a beloved uncle.

In the next few years, Mengele traveled to neighboring countries such
as Paraguay for his business.  He spent a lot of time in Asuncion,
where his good friend Rudel lived.  He met other German expatriates
through the Nazi pilot, including Werner Jung, who claimed to be head
of the Nazi party in Paraguay, and Alejandro von Eckstein, a captain in
the Paraguayan Army and a close friend of Stroessner.

Once again, Mengele displayed the confident air of his youth.  At the
offices of Fadro Farm, he was pleasant and charming to the employees
and exceedingly well dressed.  Colleagues recall that he liked to
whistle opera tunes as he worked.

M0SHE OFFER: One day, I started screaming,

"Heil Hitler!  Heil Hitler!"

I was immediately placed in a psychiatric hospital in Haifa called
Blumenthal.

The Blumenthal Hospital was very special-it specialized in treating
Holocaust survivors.

I spent nearly two years at Blumenthal.  I was in a terrible
condition.

They gave me shock treatments.  I was forced to take a lot of
medications

At one point, I was taking fifteen pills a day.

But everyone was very kind to me over there.  They helped me as much as
they could.

When I left Blumenthal, I felt very much alone.  I would walk around
the streets by myself I was like a bum.

And no one in Germany seemed interested in arresting Dr.  Mengele-or
any other Nazi war criminal.  Other countries like the United States
were allowing former Nazis to settle and blend into mainstream
culture.

Some of the Germans the United States recruited for its budding space
program, such as Walter Rudolf, had run factories during the war maimed
by slave laborers.  But their pasts were swept aside as they built
American rockets that could compete against the Russian-designed space
technology, and they became honored, valued citizens of this country.

Mengele's prospects, seemingly so glum only a few years back, had
brightened considerably.  In many ways, the exile years in Argentina
had proven to be idyllic.  Dr.  Mengele once again enjoyed friends,
money, status, and considerable nifluence.

eight.

THE ANGEL RETREATS VERA GROSSMAN.

Times were very hard for us in Israel.  Our family had no money.  We
moved to a horrible slum in the Arab section of Ha if a. It was the
only apartment our parents could afford.

The window of my room overlooked a courtyard.  I would watch as drug
addicts injected themselves.  It was terrifying.

Our parents had four babies to support, but there was nothing to eat in
the house.  It was so different from the life we had known in
England.

Yet in England we had also suffered, because we missed our mother.

Olga and I were forced to abandon our studies and go to work.  We were
only fifteen years old.  Our entire schooling consisted of the five
years we'd spent in England.

I had dreamed of studying drawing.  Instead, I had to take whatever job
I could find to earn some money.

I took a hundred different odd jobs.  I did anything and everything to
earn a bit of money.  I worked in an ice-cream factory.  I became a
dressmaker.  Olga got a job as a hairdresser.  Whatever we earned, we
gave to our mother-every last penny.  We never bought anything for
ourselves.

I remember going to stores and smelling the food because I was hungry,
yet buying nothing.  I would take the money and tell Mother,

"Don't worry about me, I don't need anything."

One day, a matchmaker introduced me to an American boy who was looking
for a bride.  He was a very, very rich young man, and he was prepared
to take me to the United States.

He liked me, and tried to persuade me to marry him.  He offered me a
good life in America.  But I refused.

When he persisted, I finally told him,

"Look.  I have been through hell living apart from my mother.  Now that
I am with her, I am not going to leave her to go to America with
you."

Yet the situation at home kept getting worse.  Olga was very sick.

And no one could figure out what was wrong with her.  She kept
fainting.

OLGA GROSSMAN: On Yom Kippur, I passed out at the synagogue.  In the
middle of services I fell to the ground.  My mother panicked and asked,
"Could someone please bring some water?"

A soldier in uniform came out of the crowd, and brought me a glass of
water.  His name was Rafael, and he was the only person in the entire
congregation who bothered to come to my aid.

I saw him like a dream when I woke up.  He was so handsome.

We got to know each other when I went to thank him.  I was very shy.  I
could hardly look at a boy.  But I realized he was everything for me.

As far as I was concerned, he was my guardian angel-I called him my
angel Rafael.

It turned out we had similar backgrounds.  He, too, had been at
Auschwitz.  He was the only one in his entire family to have come out
alive.  He lost his parents, his two brothers, and a sister.

There was an instant kinship between us, but he didn't propose
immediately.  I was only seventeen; he was ten years older.  He was a
professional soldier.  I liked that.  He was very masculine, very
tough.

It gave me courage, seeing him in uniform.

When he asked me to marry him, my parents were worried because I was so
young.  He promised them he would wait-until I turned eighteen.  We
were married the following year.

The ski trip to Switzerland gave Mengele an opportunity to get to know
not only his son but also the woman who would later become his bride.

Martha Mengele, the tall, attractive widow of his brother Karl, had got
along famously with Josef.  Martha moved to Argentina with her
twelve-year-old son, Karl Heinz, in the fall of 1956.  They settled in
Mengele's impressive villa in Olivos, near Peron's former residence.

Photographs they sent back to the family in Gunzburg showed a dashing
couple.  At last, Mengele had the "family unit" he had craved-husband,
wife, and child together again.

On the surface, Martha and Josef seemed a perfect match.  Like Mengele,
Martha was a triumph of style over substance.  During her Gunzburg
youth, she had been an object of admiration because of her lithe figure
and beautiful face.  At thirty-five, she took pains with her
appearance, and looked, in the words of an old acquaintance, "like a
fashion model."  The couple was urged to marry by relatives,
particularly Karl Sr.  It is unclear how well Martha knew her
brotherin-law before she gave in to Karl Sr.'s pressure.  Certainly, by
marrying Josef, she solved two of his most pressing concerns: retaining
the firm in Mengcle hands and caring for Beppo in South America.  The
Mengeles had been worried that popular Martha would remarry outside the
family.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: As a young girl, my mother was so overprotective, she
didn't even want me to go out on dates.  I could not make any
friends.

If a boy invited me to the cinema, she would say to me,

"Why should you go out to the movies with him tonight, and leave me
here alone?"

I invariably turned the boy down.

Mother was always talking about Ruthie.  She would tell me,

"If I had the other twin, it would be much easier.  But I only have
you.

My love is only for you."

I was very close to my mother-too close.  She would not let me lead a
normal life.  I was very much under her control.  Our relationship was
not healthy-especially her attachment to me.

The native Israeli girls, the

"Sabras," were so free, so sure of themselves.  They had lots of
friends.  They went out with boys, alone and in groups.  But I stayed
home with my mother.

One day, I was invited to a party by someone who was also from Eastern
Europe.  This time, I accepted the invitation.

That's how I met my husband.  He was from Yugoslavia, and also a
concentration-camp survivor.

He had been at Bergen-Belsen.  He lost both his mother and father when
he was thirteen.  The Nazis murdered them in front of him.  He watched
them being shot, and he remembered.

We began going out.  Mother didn't like our relationship, of course,
but I continued to see him.  We went out for three years, and then he
proposed.  He was the only man I ever dated.

Mother didn't want me to marry him.  She'd point out how poor we both
were.  "You have nothing and he has nothing."  she'd say.  "What will
become of you?"  She thought I should stay with her until I found a
better match.

I decided to marry him anyway.

In 1958, Martha and Josef decided to get married and flew to Uruguay
for the ceremony News of the nuptials caused a stir in Gunzburg.

Josef's boyhood friends were astonished that he had married his late
brother's wife.  Those who knew Martha were taken abac knot by her
decision to marry yet another Mengele, but to live in some South
American backwater.  In Gunzburg, Martha was seen as a playgirl, and
something of a gold digger.  Years earlier, she had become pregnant by
Karl Mengele, Jr while she was married to one of his best friends, a
local businessman named Wilhelm Ensmann.  She promptly divorced Ensmann
and married Karl.  The baby, Karl Heinz, was the object of a paternity
suit, but a court ruled he was Karl's child.

Martha's strong predilection for the good life was well-known.  It was
hard to imagine her doing without the comforts of Europe.

VERA GROSSMAN: My husband, Shmuel, came from a family that was even
poorer than mine.  I met him through another matchmaker.

He lived with his parents in an Arab village.  His house was so run
down that when I spent the night there, I kept thinking the roof would
cave in.

But he was a very good-looking boy, very nice and understanding.

He was six years older than I, and worked as a pipe-fitter.  We liked
each other immediately, and he proposed.

But our engagement wasn't official until my stepfather gave his
blessing.  When my stepfather met Shmuel's parents, they realized they
had known each other in Poland before the war.  My stepfather said they
were a very good family, and he approved the union.

The wedding took place only three months after we met.  His family had
to sell a cow to raise money for the ceremony.

We rented the cheapest apartment we could find in Haifa.  It was a
little shack perched on top of the roof of a five-story building in the
Arab section.  There was a little room where you could fit a bed and
nothing else-not even a dresser or a table.  The bathroom was
practically in the kitchen.  It didn't even have a closet.

On my wedding day, I went over to the apartment to try to fix it up.  I
found a space in the wall where I decided to build a makeshift
closet.

I took a hammer and broke down the wall all by myself and constructed a
small closet.

I marched down the aisle with blisters on my hands.

We couldn't afford a honeymoon, so we moved into our apartment that
same day.  But first, I had to return my bridal gown, which I had
borrowed from a friend.

After the wedding, I went by foot to return it-I walked two or three
kilometers because I couldn't afford a taxi.  Then I walked several
kilometers more back to our new apartment.

MOSHE OFFER: I met my first wife shortly after leaving the Blumenthal
Hospital.  I was seventeen, she was eighteen.

We fell madly in love, and decided to get married immediately.

She became pregnant shortly after our wedding.  I was very happy for
the first time since the war.  At last, someone was taking care of
me.

I had no idea she herself was not well.

I learned, too late, that she had a heart condition.  She should never
have gotten pregnant.  She died in childbirth.  She left behind a
healthy baby girl, our daughter.

I was devastated.  I had loved her so much.  She had saved my life.

After she died, I didn't know what to do.  Finally, I showed up at the
door of Blumenthal, carrying our baby in my arms.

Josef and Martha's bliss was short-lived.  Within months of their
marriage, he was picked up by the local police.  When he had first
arrived in Argentina eight years before, he had treated the sick
daughter of his roommate at the pension in Vicente Loper.  The
authorities were investigating him for practicing medicine without a
license.  Mengele was also implicated in a ring of doctors who were
illegally performing abortions.  He was questioned by police and held
for a few days, but the charges were apparently dropped.

Mengele's life was marred by yet more drama when his father died in
1959.  The news was a terrible blow to Josef, who lost his most loyal
supporter in the Mengele family.  Karl Sr.  had never stopped loving
his son, in spite of the growing evidence of Beppo's appalling crimes
during the war.

The death of Gunzburg's leading citizen-and its largest
employer-prompted a funeral procession that stretched across town.

Hundreds of people came to pay their respects to the man who had done
his best to make the Mengele name honorable again, and Josef is
believed to have made a quick, furtive trip to attend his father's
funeral.  Although the reports are contradictory, a couple that was
friendly with Mengele at the time told German prosecutors that He was
indeed in Gunzburg to pay his final respects.  A large wreath appeared
mysteriously OIl the grave of Karl Mengele, bearing the inscription,
"Greetings from someone far away.

The death of Karl Sr.  came at a time when Mengele's life was again
stirred by turnLoil.  In addition to his problems with the Argentine
police, he was once again a wanted man.  That same year, 1959, the
German government made an effort to locate the Auschwitz doctor.

It was spurred by a new breed of Nazi-hunters who were trying to track
down old Nazi war criminals: concentration-camp survivors determined to
avenge the deaths of loved ones by going after those who had escaped
punishment.

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 Nazi-hunting 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 correspond-I 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.

On May 11, 1960, the capture of Eichmann was revealed to an incredulous
world.  Eichmann had been living under the pseudonym of Ricardo
Klement.  Each day, the former Gestapo colonel took a bus to his dreary
job.  Unlike Mengele, Eichmann had no family money to invest in a
business of his own or to vacation within Swiss ski resorts.

The man in charge of rounding up all of Europe's Jews for the death
camps was now nothing but a lowly clerk eking out a living to support a
wife and four children.  Instead of residing in a fine villa such as
Mengele's, his family was squeezed into a little house that had neither
running water nor electricity.

Mengele, for whom such things had always mattered, had not really
socialized with Eichmann, presumably because his social status was too
low.  But they did share contacts in the Kameradenwerk, the secret
organization that gave aid to former Nazis.  Wilhelm Sassens, the
journalist for Der Weg who had helped Mengele in his early days, had
also befriended Eichmann.

After the kidnapping, Martha decided she had had enough South American
adventures and returned to Europe with little Karl Heinz.

It was clear to her that she and Josef would never be able to lead a
normal life together, and she had no interest in following him to his
next place of refuge: Brazil.  Life in the cultured, cosmopolitan
Argentine capital had been tolerable for Martha; Paraguay and Brazil
would be impossible.  Martha's complaints about her rough life in the
backwaters of South America became the talk of Gunzburg.  Residents of
the sleepy town still chuckle when they remember Martha whining about
her ordeal as the bride of Josef Mengele: Why, she had even been forced
to do housework.  Somehow, the image of sleek Martha mopping floors and
scrubbing pots and pans in the wilds of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil
engendered more derision than sympathy.

VEEA GROSSMAN: After we were married, my husband and I continued to
support our families-even though we had barely enough money to live
ourselves.

I suffered, but I never complained.  I told myself As long as I am
alive, it's okay.  My optimism helped me to overcome the hard times.  I
got through the hard times because of my spirit.  I would tell my
husband,

"I don't mind being poor."  With hope in your heart, you feel
optimistic, and you overcome every hardship.

In his Paraguayan hideout, Mengele wrote about the Eichmann capture in
his journals, saying he now had to be even more careful than before.

The good old days when he could saunter into the German embassy and
coolly request an ID under his own name, then jet off for a European
holiday, were gone forever.  In the fall of 1960, Mengele moved to
Brazil.  His friend Rudel had set him up with a man who could help him,
an unrepentant Austrian Nazi named Wolfgang Gerhard.  Gerhard worked
out a safe living arrangement for the Auschwitz doctor.  Mengele went
into hiding again, and remained out of the public eye for the rest of
his life.

The Eichmann capture seemed to augur a new era where Nazihunting would
become a more aggressive pursuit.  Men like Simon Wiesenthal and
Langbein, both working out of Vienna, sought to pressure the German
government, eager to forget the war and now securely launched into
postwar reconstruction, to do more.  Their persistence, combined with
the anti-Nazi sentiments fueled by the Eichmann kidnap, jolted Germany
out of its lethargy.  In the fifteen years since the end of the war,
the Germans had appeared reluctant to punish the perpetrators of the
Holocaust.  The Central Agency for Investigation of War Crimes, which
had been assembled in 1958, had in two years accomplished very
little.

But months after Eichmann's capture, the Germans revealed some dazzling
Nazi-hunting skills of their own.  Richard Baer, the commandant of
Auschwitz after Rudolf Hess, was arrested, as were members of the
Eichmann "team."  There was a new element at work that added impetus to
Germany's initiative to hunt down Nazis.  The Eichmann Capture and
trial had stirred up deep feelings of guilt and shame in many
Germans.

Gideon Hausner, the Israeli prosecutor, received many moving apologies
from individuals throughout Germany in the course of the trial.  One
young German wrote Hausner that he wanted to "atone" for what his
elders had done "against humanity."  He offered to work in Israel, and
indicated his group of friends were ready to do the same.  Their only
question was,

"Will you take us?"  One German family wrote that they had been
inspired by the revelations of Nazi atrocities to go see Dachau. Deeply
moved, the family emerged from their tour of the death camp convinced
that "whatever punishment was meted out to Eichmann was not enough."

MENASHE LORINCZI: Until the Eichmann trial, survivors never talked
about the Holocaust because nobody believed them.  When I was in the
army, I tried to tell people what had happened to me at Auschwitz under
Dr.  Mengele.

"Are you crazy?"  the other soldiers said to me.

HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: The Eichmann trial destroyed us inside.

Everything came back-the dead bodies they piled up in front of our
barracks, day and night, day and night, day and night.  We kept
thinking about that throughout the trial.

Until then, no one spoke about what happened in the war.  We would tell
friends our stories, and nobody believed us-nobody.

ALEX DEKEL: I went to see Eichmann, face-to-face, in his cell the day
before he was executed.  I asked him if he remembered me.  He said
no.

Then I rolled up my sleeve and showed him the tattooed number on my
arm.  He turned away.

MIRIAM MOB: After the war, it was something shamful to admit you were a
Holocaust victim.  Nobody wanted to talk about it.

I was lucky.  I was able to confide in my husband from the start.

He was a good listener.  I told him the whole story of what had
happened to me at Auschwitz as a Mengele twin.  He was a Sabra, and he
had not lived through the war, but he was very interested-even in those
years when nobody cared.  He wanted to know all about the Holocaust.

He sympathized with what I had gone through.

He would tell me,

"How could a child without a mother or father return to the world, go
to school, get married and lead the life of a normal person?"

He made me feel like a heroine.

But in those years, I didn't feel especially heroic.  No one wanted to
listen to my story.  I had aunts and uncles, and several cousins.  They
never asked me what had happened to me at Auschwitz.  They never wanted
to know.  And my feeling was that nobody wanted to know, except my
husband-until Eichmann.

During the Eichmann trial, this changed dramatically.  Even though
there was no television, only radio and newspapers, we all allowed
it.

Some survivors were so upset by the revelations, they committed suicide
after the trial.

The Germans refrained from requesting Eichmann's extradition from
Israel, presumably so as not to embarrass the Israelis or themselves.

Germany had abolished capital punishment, and there was the disturbing
possibility that even if they tried Eichmann, he would receive a
lenient sentence.

This, indeed, had been the outcome in the trials of most of the Nazis
Germany had caught since the end of the war.  Eichmann's legal adviser
had been sentenced to only five years' hard labor.  Otto Bradfish, who
killed fifteen thousand Jews as part of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile
killing units in the East, got ten years' hard labor.  And Josef
Lechthaler, who had slaughtered Jews in Russia, got only three-and
a-half years behind bars.

But however minimal Germany's reckoning with its past, at least arrests
were made.  Germany even managed to apprehend a few high ranking Nazis
still at large.  Karl Wolff, for example, who had served on Heinrich
Himmler's personal staff, was nabbed and tried.  He was quoted as
saying how he had greeted "with particular joy.  ... he news that for
two weeks now, a train has been carrying every day members of the
Chosen People from Warsaw to Treblinka."

The seizure of Eichmann sent Nazis who were hiding around the world
deeper into the underground.  Like Eichmann-and Mengele -many of
Hitler's henchmen had sought refuge in South America, posing as simple
citizens.  They were in close touch with one another by way of what
Hausner called a "grapevine that spanned the South American continent
and reached into the remotest parts of the pampas and jungle."  From
then on, every one of them would be haunted by the fear that a team of
Israeli agents was on his tail, ready to pounce on him.

Around the time of the Eichmann kidnapping and trial, Rolf Mengele was
told by his stepfather, Hackenjos, that

"Uncle Fritz," the man he had corresponded with and loved from afar,
was really his father.

Interviews Rolf has given suggest he was deeply shaken by the
revelation, coming as it did on the heels of newspaper stories
depicting Mengele as a monster, and a perverted, ruthless war
criminal.

German newspapers were replete with sensational accounts of the
Auschwitz Angel of Death, and young Rolf fifteen at the time, was
teased about his last name.

But as Rolf later told journalists, his family insisted to him the
media accounts were wrong.  He was told he should be proud to have
Josef Mengele as a father.  The Mengeles told Rolf that Josef was a
good and brilliant man who spoke Greek and Latin fluently and had
earned several advanced degrees.  Rolf's own cousin, Karl Heinz, who
had lived with Mengele in South America, confirmed what the rest of the
family was saying.  Mengele was clever and caring.  He had been a good
father to him, strict, but extremely fair, Karl Heinz insisted.

It was difficult for the teenager to try to reconcile the two images of
Dr.  Mengele-that provided by his family and the one offered by the
rest of the world.  Anguished by the revelations, he began failing at
school.  His teachers attributed this to the trauma of being the son of
Josef Mengele.  The tenor of his correspondence with the man he had
known all his life as Uncle Fritz changed as a result, becoming erratic
and petulant, he confided in these same interviews.

OLGA GROSSMAN: How scary it was for me to have children.  All the
unpleasant memories came back to me.  We had watched little babies
thrown into the ovens.

I was very, very worried during my pregnancies.  I suffered all the
time.  What will come out of me?  I wondered.  This child, will it be
normal?

I would agonize over what had been done to me by Dr.  Mengele.

I was sure I would have an abnormal baby-because of all the tests and
experiments.

After the childbirth, when they told me I had a beautiful, healthy
baby, I collapsed.

It was too good to be really true.  I had a nervous breakdown and had
to be institutionalized.

MIRIAM MOZES: I was very depressed after the birth of my first child.

I saw other women in the hospital being visited by their mothers, and
that was very painful to me.  For even though I was very happy, very
excited over the birth of my daughter, I felt badly [that] my mother
wasn't there.

Only my husband came to see me.  And Eva.  My twin became like my
mother.  She went to buy everything for the child.  She would come all
the time.  But I still found myself staring at the other young women,
and envying the fact that their mothers would come and fuss over
them.

The Eichmann case also had serious side effects that threatened the
safety of Jewish communities the world over.  If the capture had forced
old Nazis to lay low, it also prompted their supporters to emerge.

There were rabid anti-Semitic outbursts throughout Latin America, and a
renewed interest in Nazi causes and ideals.  The rise in pro-Nazi
sentiment was an offshoot of the resentment many South American nations
felt toward Israel.  These countries viewed the kidnapping of Eichmann
as a violation of their sovereignty-a lawless affront to Argentina's
honor.  There were also angry formal protests at the United Nations.

In June 1960, Argentina made a formal complaint to the UN Security
Council, protesting what Israel had done.

Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who had given the Mossad, the
Jewish intelligence service, the go-ahead to nab Eichmann, began to see
the negative consequences of the operation.  Although the trial had
certainly raised the world's consciousness, he worried that there would
be a backlash.  In addition, Israel had been rebuked by some of its
staunchest friends, including General Telford Taylor, for violating
international law.

With the May 1962 execution of Eichmann, Ben-Gurion's worst fears were
realized.  There were anti-Semitic episodes around the world.

On June 24, 1962, a young Argentine Jewish girl, Graciella Sirota, was
kidnapped on her way to school.  Her assailants carved a swastika on
her breast and inflicted severe burns all over her body.  She was told,
"This is revenge.  You Jews are responsible for Eichmann's death."

Four days later, a male student, son of a Catholic father and a Jewish
mother, was attacked by four youths who slashed swastikas in his cheeks
and forehead and beat him savagely.

Secret memoranda sent by Argentine Jewry to major American Jewish
organizations reflected the panic roused by the anti-Semitic
incidents.

There was a sense that the Nazis were capable of regrouping in South
America to "recreate" the Third Reich.  It was believed the Nazis were
involved in a plot to install a fascist regime in Argentina, and that
once in power, its first goal would be to exterminate the Jews.

Since the fall of Peron, the instability of the Argentine government
had indeed helped stir up anti-Semitism in a population already
predisposed against Jews.  There were dozens of nationalist and
reactionary groups fomenting hatred and advocating violence and other
forms of retribution, an extremism that recalled some of the blackest
days of Hitler's Germany.  For the vulnerable Jewish community, with
its many war refugees, all the ingredients were there for a terrible
repeat of history.  As one 1962 memorandum from a local Jewish
organization noted,

"Events have crystallized, particularly after the conclusion of the
Eichmann trial.  It has been proven to us that the Nazi minority have
entrenched themselves.  While today, they represent no Immediate
danger, they can under disturbed general conditions come to the fore. .
The major question was what the Nazis would do to avenge the execution
of Eichmann.

As Israel had to decide whether to pursue more Nazis, Ben-Gurion began
to have doubts about continuing.  The Mossad, however, was buoyant over
the success of the Eichmann capture.  Isser Harel, then head of Israeli
intelligence, was especially proud.  From an operational point of view,
it had gone practically without a hitch.  His handpicked team had
entered Argentina undetected and left the country with no one guessing
whom they had in tow.  Although they had been prepared to kill anyone
who stood in their way, there was no loss of life.  With the Eichmann
operation completed, the Mossad team was eager to return and mount a
full-scale attempt to apprehend the elusive doctor Josef Mengele.

Harel was especially anxious to capture Mengele, whom he personally
considered much more despicable than the bureaucrat Eichmann.  But
Ben-Gurion, increasingly fearful of the repercussions against Jews and
against Israel, is believed to have counseled Harel against undertaking
any more missions.  Nevertheless, the feisty Mossad chief had his men
discreetly continue the hunt for Mengele.

Tales of the Mossad's search for Mengele belong more to the realm of
mythology than history.  Details about the secret operations have been
considerably embellished by the ex-agents who took part in them.

There are stories of searches launched across Europe and South America
and stakeouts deep in the heart of the Paraguayan jungle.  Various
agents who have "gone public," including Harel, Rafael Eitan, and Peter
Malkin, all three of whom were on the original Eichmann kidnapping
team, have given confused, exaggerated, and usually contradictory
accounts of the Mossad's attempts to find Mengele.  Harel himself has
said that although his men did finally locate Mengele, it would have
taken a small army to nab him, with only limited chances of success and
the possibility of great bloodshed.  Other agents have insisted the
Mossad never came close to finding the Auschwitz doctor of death.  One
fact is undisputable: The Mossad ultimately failed in its attempts to
capture Mengele.

By 1962, any impetus for continuing the hunt for Mengele was lost
because of Harel's involvement in other matters.  His disputes with
Ben-Gurion, and resignation the following year, halted any real or
imaginary plans the Mossad may have had.  Relations between Harel and
Ben-Gurion had been poor for years.  In 1962, the final confrontation
between them came over Nazis in Egypt, not South America.

The Israelis learned that Egypt was starting up a rocket program with
the help of Nazi scientists.  Much to the embarrassment of the Mossad,
information about the program surfaced only when Egyptian strongman
Gamal Abdel Nasser paraded the rockets through the streets of Cairo.

It was charged that Harel had focused his agency's resources on the
wrong enemy.

In a show of passion, Harel offered his resignation in 1963-some say
with the certainty it would be refused.  Harel had built the Israeli
secret service and had turned it into one of the world's leading
intelligence agencies.  But Ben-Gurion had apparently had enough of
Harel, and resented his insubordination.  The resignation was
accepted.

Once again, fate had intervened to help the Angel of Death elude
punishment.  Isser Harel had been the person most fervently committed
to the idea of pursuing ex-Nazis.  He had kept a secret notebook on
Mengele, recording whatever information he collected on his character
traits and proclivities.  When he resigned, the main threat to
Mengele's survival was gone.  The men who would follow Harel as head of
the Mossad were also talented superspies, but none showed the same
unswerving concern in hunting down Nazi war criminals.  A young PLO
thug was seen as a far greater threat than the aging Nazi doctor who
had condemned hundreds of thousands to die with a wave of the hand.

But long after the Israelis had abandoned the chase, Mengele continued
to be haunted by the fear that the Mossad was after him.

Years after the execution of Eichmann, he still harbored the notion
that the Israelis were plotting to kidnap him.  A strange mixture of
fear and arrogance persisted in Mengele even into his old age, so that
he continued to believe he was the target of a manhunt.  In one
retreat, a remote Brazilian farm where he moved sometime in 1962, he
ordered a watchtower to be built so he could observe the roads in
search of the secret agents who never arrived.  Farmhands would later
recall how the Auschwitz doctor anxiously stalked the grounds,
surrounded by packs of fierce dogs.

Mengele was determined to outwit all his enemies.  If the Nazihunters
were searching for a wealthy, dashing businessman, he would fool them
by posing as a humble farm manager.  They would scour the cities and
jungles of Paraguay-and he would retire to an obscure Brazilian
village.  His pursuers would seek a mansion, protected by legions of
uniformed guards, and he would be safely tucked away in an
unpretentious little farm.

In the early 1960s, in his new Brazilian hideaway, Mengele was once
again alone.  His father was dead; his wife and stepson had left him.

His beautiful Argentine villa now belonged to someone else.

Gone also was his beloved Borgward

Isabel Ia All the efforts he had expended in the last decade to build a
new life had come to nothing.

HEDvAH AND LEAK STERN: Our lives really began when we built our Moshav,
our communal settlement.  We and a group of young people decided we
needed a place we could call home.  There were twenty of us, boys and
girls, and we had come from all over Europe.  We were all Holocaust
survivors, and many of us had been at Auschwitz.

We picked a site in Ashdod, near the sea.  We thought we could combine
agriculture and fishing.  We called our commune

"Nir Galim," which means the air and the waves.

At first, we lived in tents-then in huts.  Finally, we built houses for
ourselves.  We worked very hard.  We tilled the soil.  We cooked meals
in the kitchen, and washed the pots and pans.  If we found a piece of
wood, we were overjoyed, because we could use it to build a table.  We
used whatever we could find to build the Moshav.

Yet Auschwitz remained with us-everything around us reminded us of
it.

From our Moshav, we could see the chimneys of a factory in downtown
Ashdod.  We were reminded of the chimneys of Auschwitz, especially at
night, when the flames poured out.

Dr.  Mengele was getting on in years.  His once-fine features were
turning flaccid.  At fifty-one, he suffered from a variety of small
aches and pains that foreshadowed the infirmities of old age.  The man
who had condemned so many to die began to confront the notion of his
own impending death.  Alone and sickly on an isolated little farm, he
awaited the empty days that stretched ahead, filled only with an
unrelenting loneliness.  Mengele was in a state of despair, anxious to
leave a record of some sort behind.  There was little left to hope for:
with his father now dead, it was unclear how sympathetic the rest of
the family would be to him.

It was in his new hideout, on a remote farm hundreds of kilometers away
from Sao Paulo, that Mengele began to work on his memoirs.

Facing a dreary and uncertain future, he found it more comforting to
look to the past instead, back to the halcyon days of his privileged
youth, when it seemed certain the world was to one day be his for the
taking.

ZYL THE SAILOR: I went all over the world, and I always wanted to go
elsewhere-to yet another foreign city or country I hadn't seen.

Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit.  Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New York,
Philadelphia.

I sailed without a break.  I would go from one ship to another, from
one voyage to the next.  I was married-and yes, it was hard on my
marriage-but still, I sailed.

My wife and I bought an apartment in Ashdod, near the sea.  From the
window, I could see the chimneys of the factories.  They made me think
of the crematoriums.  And so I would leave her for weeks and months at
a stretch.

I sailed wherever there was water.  I worked as a fisherman in the
North Sea.  When they opened up the Great Lakes, I was on the first
ship to travel there.  "What are these Great Lakes?"  I wondered.  I
had to know.

But eventually, I found myself back at Auschwitz.  I was at Auschwitz,
no matter where I went.

nine.

BRAZILIAN HIDEAWAY.

For years after the war, the popular line was that we, the survivors,
had allowed the Germans to lead us "like sheep" to the slaughter.

When I joined the Israeli Army, for example, I was surrounded by many
so-called heroes.  They were all tough guys.  They constantly boasted
about all the Arabs they had killed.  And they really looked down on me
for having been a camp victim.

When I tried to tell them what I had gone through, my army buddies
would ask,

"How could you have let the Germans do this to you?"

It's taken me years to come up with the answer.

When we were liberated from Auschwitz, I remember the Russians captured
some five thousand Nazi SS men.  I saw these two

"Mussulmans"-Jewish inmates, thin as skeletons, who had been left to
die-take the guns away from these SS men and start shooting.  And you
know what?  Not a single one of the Nazis even tried to run away.

I watched as the Germans sat, awaiting their turn to be killed.  There
were only these two frail little Mussulmans.  Yet the Germans sat
there-like sheep.

As we, the Holocaust survivors, became stronger, we began speaking
up.

"What are you talking about when you say we went 'like sheep'?

Wasn't there an uprising in Treblinka?  Didn't we fight in the Warsaw
Ghetto?  And what about the Partisans?"

And today, when I am asked that question, I tell people it doesn't
matter whether you're Hungarian, Polish, Jewish, or German: If you
don't have a gun, you have nothing.

The Jews who were brought by cattle car to Auschwitz weren't told they
were going to a death camp: they believed they were going to be working
They had not worked in years.  They were hungry, and they wanted to
eat.  They thought that by working for the Germans, they would have
food and money, and they'd be able to survive until the war ended.

That's why they went quietly-that's why they didn't cry, or shout.

And then Dr.  Mengele would tell them,

"Please take off your clothes because you need to take a shower."  And
off they went into the gas chambers, very quietly.  Everything was done
very quietly.  When was there even time for an uprising?

There were people inside the camps who found ways to smuggle out
letters to relatives and friends describing what the Germans were
doing.

But absolutely no one believed them.

ZYL THE SAILOR: One day, the Israeli government selected me to join a
group sailing to Germany to collect goods for Holocaust victims.  The
German government had decided to make some special reparations, and we
were to pick up their gifts and bring them back to Israel.

We were very excited; everyone on the ship was a concentration camp
survivor.

When we sailed into the port of Bremen we were greeted by German Coast
Guard officers.  We noticed immediately they were wearing the same
uniform as the SS.  It was exactly the same-the jacket, the trousers,
even the cap.

They were very nice to us, these Germans-but we hated them anyway.  Our
government should have known better than to send a bunch of Holocaust
victims back to Germany.

They would greet us every day by saying,

"Good morning," but what we heard was,

"Dirty Jew."

One night, we went to a bar in the port.  We got roaring drunk and
started a brawl.  The police arrived, arrested us, and dragged us to
the police station.  We were enraged.  We shouted,

"Fine: We'll take over the police station."  Then, we started fighting
with the cops, too.

We were ready to go to war with the German police, using the same
tactics we had been taught in the Israeli Army.

The Germans were totally dismayed.  They didn't know what to do.

And to their credit, they acted like perfect gentlemen.  They did their
best to behave themselves.  It was clear they didn't want any trouble
with Jews.

None of us were thrown in jail, even though we had done a lot of
damage, both to the bar and to the police station.  We were booked,
placed on trial, and we had to pay a large fine.

Nearly twenty years after the war, West Germany was at last ready to
showcase its repentance for the Holocaust: It would hold its own
war-crimes trials.  Preparations for the Frankfurt trials were
encouraged by Fritz Bauer, a German Jew who was powerful in Germany's
judicial system.  Bauer, prosecutor general for the state of Hesse (a
position equivalent to state attorney general in the United States),
was the man who had secretly tipped off the Israelis on where to find
Eichmann.

He had done so only after concluding his own country would never launch
a serious pursuit.  Courageous and energetic, Bauer was attached to his
native Germany, but also cynical about the Germans' willingness to
atone for their terrible past.

But now, with Bauer's help, German atonement was actually taking
place.

He gathered some of the best lawyers in the country to take part in the
trial.  Their official mission was to ferret out and prosecute any
remaining Nazi war criminals.

Mengele, now living on a small farm in Brazil, followed the proceedings
with contempt.  In a diary entry dated May 2, 1962, he complained about
the "beginning of a new witch hunt in Germany."

He was referring to efforts by prosecutors to locate defendants for the
trials, which would not take place for nearly two years.

His writings suggest he was appalled that his beloved Deutschland could
turn against its own.  He had never stopped loving and missing Germany,
but he was enraged at the way it was treating men like himself-loyal
soldiers of the Third Reich.  Mengele still longed for what he called
in a letter to his old school friend Hans Sedlmeier "the incredible
zest for life of the German nation under Adolf Hitler."

In the same letter, he delivered a stinging indictment of postwar
Germany.  He noted that "ninety percent [of the German population] were
made to suffer and feel guilty."  Any people with Nazi ties had been
classified by the government into different categories of culprits:
There were the "followers" and the "profit-seekers," the "guilty" and
the "extremely guilty," and, finally, the war criminals.  Depending on
one's classification, "one paid one's dues and became a rehabilitated
citizen."  Mengele resented a system that parceled out guilt and
innocence with such apparent precision and ease.  He also perceived its
fundamental hypocrisy.  "Later, those who had formerly occupied high
positions got their retirement income again (slightly lowered) or jobs
in private industry," he wrote Sedlmeier.

PETER SOMOGYL: I left England for Canada, and there I was able to get a
good job very quickly-with a German firm.  It was called Bosch, and
although it had been one of the largest industrial companies before the
war, it had not used any slave labor.

The company 5 German executives knew I was Jewish when they hired me: I
told them straight out.  I also told them I was a concentration camp
victim.  I even showed them my tattooed number.  It turned out there
were a couple of other Jews working there, too.  Most of the German
employees were very careful about what they said around us.  Many of
them had emigrated to Canada; they had probably been Nazis.

The firm was very good to me.  I was promoted quickly.  I was
transferred from the Toronto office to Montreal, and made manager.  I
was able to send for my father, who was still in Israel.  I even got
him a job at Bosch, also.

In Montreal, the office manager's husband was also German.  Out of the
blue, one day, he formally apologized to my father for having been a
Nazi during the war.  He told him how much he regretted his past
actions.

I continued to be promoted.  My bosses liked my work, but I knew even
then I would probably never reach the top, because I wasn't German.

One day, one of our regular German customers dropped by.  We started
chatting.  He said he had a Jewish boss and that he didn't like him
very much.  He complained his boss didn't want to give him a raise.

He was confiding in me for he assumed that because I worked for Bosch,
I was German.  He had no idea I was both Jewish and a Holocaust
survivor.

The more he talked, the more he made anti-Semitic remarks.  He finally
said something about "those Jews-isn't it a pity Hitler didn't finish
the job."

That's when I lost my temper.  I grabbed him by his shirt and told him,
"You're talking to the wrong man.  Get out, and don't you ever come in
here again."

Then I went to my German boss and told him what I had done.  I said,
"Customer or not, I had to throw him out-you can fire me if you want.

But my boss was behind me all the way.  I continued to do well in the
firm.

In Mengele's eyes, the "new" Germany forgave those it wanted to
forgive, while making scapegoats out of a small number of others.  He
may have been thinking jealously of his former scientific colleagues
who were now successfully reintegrated into German life, foremost among
them his old mentor Verschuer, now professor emeritus at the University
of Munster.  Any hint of his past crimes had been conveniently
erased.

How stark the contrast to what had been done to Mengele.  Even after
all these years, still "one revived the guilt of certain people," he
wrote in the same letter to Sedlmeier, alluding to efforts by Germany
to bring Nazis to book.  He seemed to see a parallel between his own
plight and that of Germany.  Quoting former German president von
Hindenburg, he observed,

"It is easy to tread on a dead lion."

Life on the remote Brazilian farm was lonely and miserable.  He was
posing as a Swiss emigre named Peter Hochbichler.  His companions were
a Hungarian couple named Geza and Gitta Stammer.  His old friend
Colonel Rudel had asked another acquaintance, a fanatic Austrian Nazi
named Wolfgang Gerhard, to find people who could protect Mengele.

Gerhard had recommended the Stammers, who had been avid fascists prior
to leaving their native Hungary during the Russian invasion of 1956.

Even if they learned of the lonely SS doctor's identity, Gerhard
gambled they would be sympathetic.  A deal was worked out.  The
Stammers were to care for

"Hochbichler," about whom they were told only that he was a Swiss
exile.  Mengele family money helped pay for a small farm the Stammers
would "own."  Mengele would assist in managing the farm-at no salary-a
deal remIniscent of his days on the Fischer farm in Mangolding.

Mengele went to live with the Stammers in 1961.  The Stammers were
amiable enough, especially the wife, Gitta, but they were clearly on
neither Mengele's social nor his intellectual level.  After the
dazzling Nazi company he had kept in Argentina and Paraguay, it was
hard to get used to spending his time with a couple of uneducated
farmers.

With little else to occupy him, Mengele concentrated on his memoirs, a
project that required painstaking effort on his part.  That first year,
he frequently felt blocked.  "Beginning of memoirs difficult," he says
in one diary entry.  In another, he explains he has rewritten a portion
of his autobiography, and

"I am still displeased with it."

Mengele was unhappy in Brazil, a country whose multiracial population
he could not like.  Middle-aged, tired, and grumpy, he undoubtedly felt
very much the outsider in this land of the young and exuberant.  At one
point, as Mengele was arduously transcribing his innermost thoughts,
the noise and revelry from local villagers' Carnaval festivities
disturbed his concentration.  Carnaval, the traditional holiday held
the day before Lent that Brazilians celebrate with special joy and
ardor, had also been an occasion for parties in the Gunzburg of his
youth.  Then, the young Beppo was seen at all the Mardi Gras balls.

But now, he only expressed loathing at the joie de vivre of his
Brazilian neighbors.  Deeply bothered by the revelry, he complained in
his diary that the noise hampered his work on his memoirs.

Although he was only in his early fifties, the once-promising young
doctor was turning into a crotchety hypochondriac, writing daily
reports of how he felt, and constantly worried about developing some
dread disease.  "Strong migraine and attack of aphasia," wrote Mengele
on January 24, 1962.  (Aphasia, the inability to speak or understand
the spoken word, would have been an alarming ailment for the voluble
Auschwitz doctor, and possibly a forewarning of the stroke he was to
suffer years later.) The next day, he reported he was "very tired" and
had an earaehe.  On the twenty-sixth, he was "better" hut his sleep had
been disturbed by a very bad dream.  He did not describe the dream,
beyond saying he had been shouting.

MIRIAM MOZES: After I got married, my husband noticed that I cried in
my sleep.  I had terrible dreams, and I cried so loudly, my husband had
to wake me up to get me to stop.

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: The nights were especially bad.  We would feel
so frightened as if we were being persecuted.

MENASHE LORINCZI: My wife told me I cried every night-I cried and
shouted that people were trying to kill me.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I have nightmares.  My husband wakes me up and says,
"Judith, Judith, you were shouting and crying in your sleep."

VERA BLAU: The children of the Holocaust did better than the adults.

We did not realize the horror.  We didn't even have to work.  There was
nothing for us to do at Auschwitz except to play.

After the war, I went through several stages.  At first, I was very
listless, very apathetic.  I never cried.

Then, I cried.  I cried frantically.  I could not stop crying.

At the end of January 1962, there was a reprieve for a week.  In one
surprising entry during this period, Mengcle seemed positively joyous,
describing in detail the splendid Brazilian summer.  He noted the
blossoming flowers outside his window-red hibiscus, yellow lilies, and
geraniums over an expanse of green fields.  By early February, Mengele
felt well enough to spend several hours in the sun "reading poetry out
loud."

But then the litany of complaints quickly resumed.  Mengele was
plagued, it would seem, by every possible discomfort, from headaches
and insomnia to heart palpitations and dizzy spells.  What probably
contributed to his real and imagined ailments was an overwhelming sense
of anxiety.

The references to his physical and emotional symptoms are among the few
intimate details the author of the voluminous diaries included in
them.

The bulk of the documents Dr.  Mengele left behind were impersonal and
mundane, containing exhaustive references to the most trivial details
of his daily life.  There are notes on the weather, the servants, the
coffee he drank that morning, the fence he painted that afternoon.  The
contents of dozens of notebooks that supplemented the diary entries are
equally banal.  Literally hundreds of pages are devoted to discussions
on the genetic traits of birds and monkeys, the composition of blood,
and an occasional venture into philosophy.  These documents, which Rolf
inherited after Mengele's death, were made available to a select number
of German publications in 1985, and examined by scholars anxious for
clues as to the Nazis' thoughts about Auschwitz.  But even a close
reading of the material turns up no obvious references to Mengele's
time at the concentration camp.  Rolf may well have discarded any
material that cast his father in a bad light.

But there is also the possibility that the Angel of Death couldn't
write about that period of his life, either from fear of being
discovered or from a deeper desire to block out his own horrible
past.

PETER SOMOGYL: Those years after the camp, I did not think very much
about Auschwitz: I wanted to wipe it out from my memory.  It was not
with me every day-I was able to block it out.  For example, I never,
ever talked about it with my twin brother.  And so I was able to put
the war behind me-perhaps because I never admitted my own feelings to
myself JUDITH YAGUDAH: As the years passed, I tried not to think about
Auschwitz at all.  I pushed it back and tried to live in the present.

I wanted to forget.

But it was there, inside of me, like a heavy parcel I had to drag along
all the time.  I could not be happy.

My mother was always sad.  She constantly wore a tragic expression on
her face.

She wanted to talk about Ruthie.  She would remember things long
forgotten.  She wanted to tell me about them, but I didn't want to
hear.

TWINS' FATHER: I tried to forget the Holocaust.  I kept on telling myse
If how lucky I was.

I never talked about what happened with my family-not even with
Magda.

We never spoke about the loss of her little boy.

We wanted simply to forget.  My feeling was that what happened at
Auschwitz was over and done with.

Yet, there were times when I would get very depressed.

OLGA GROSSMAN: As I see it now, having children really brought back
memories.  I spent nine months being afraid.  I had a nervous breakdown
and was hospitalized after every childbirth.

One of the doctors reminded me of Mengele.  He was tall and wore a
white coat-an image of Mengele.

He ordered shock treatments.  I felt I was reliving the horror.

Instead of addressing the central episode of his life, Mengele filled
his notebooks with lengthy critiques of books, which he ordered
compulsively from Germany.  In letters home, he included long lists of
what he wanted to read, from the latest medical textbooks to treatises
on genetics and natural science.  He devoured complex works of
philosophy, history, sociology, and the sciences.  Spengler, Konrad,
Heidegger, Kierkegaard, even the Jewish intellectuals Martin Buber and
Hannah Arendt (herself a German war refugee), are cited in the journals
and notebooks.  It is far from certain that Mengele understood these
books-only that he knew they were what a well-educated German ought to
read.

After perusing Camus's The Fall, for example, Mengele decided it was
terribly overrated.  Its author, the renowned existentialist and
Resistance fighter, was contemptible in Mengele's eyes.  The Auschwitz
doctor decried the "pessimists" of the existentialist movement who were
both

"Nazi-haters and communists."  He delivered a blistering critique of
The Fall, perhaps Camus's greatest novel.  The book tells the story of
a powerful, arrogant lawyer who watches a woman drown one night and is
forever haunted by the fact that he didn't even try to save her.

The lawyer's failure to act at that critical moment destroys his
self-image.  He renounces his profession and spends his days in a
sleazy bar, rehashing his sham life.

But Josef Mengele, killer of thousands, could not conceive of feeling
remorse for allowing one single woman to die.  He did not even grasp
the ironic parallels between the fate of Camus's hero and his own
dramatic fill the fact that he, too, was spending his life in a
run-down hovel, rehashing the past.

Throughout the mundane descriptions, the banal observations, Mengele's
journals betray an intense loneliness, a longing to return to Germany
and what was left of his family.  But his homesickness for Deutschland
was always tempered by the bitterness he felt because his country had
rejected him.  "You have made it very difficult for some of your sons,
holy Fatherland, but we will not desert you, and always, always love
you," he observed.

Mengele's isolation was relieved only by occasional visits from trusted
friends.  But since not many people knew of his Brazilian hideaway,
these were few and far between.  Mengele, always cautious, seems to
have broken with the Nazi circles he had frequented in Buenos Aires
and Paraguay.  Narrowing his circle of friends probably kept him safe,
but it also made his predicament all the more desperate and galling.

He was apparently determined not to permit Eichmann's fate to befall
him.

Mengele's 1962 diary suggests mounting tension as the year wore on.

The man who had whistled gay tunes amid the carnage of Auschwitz was
unable to stand the isolation of his Brazilian hideaway.  "Very bad
headache" .  . .

"Very nervous .  . .

"Condition worsened .  .

Even reading, his favorite pastime, was an ordeal when he suffered from
one of his migraines.

Sometime later that year, the Stammers sold the property and moved to a
farm closer to Sao Paulo.  The new farm was in the town Serra Negra,
and it, too, was purchased with the help of Mengele family money.  From
a perch atop the eight-foot tower he ordered, Mengele would anxiously
watch the roads and fields, on the lookout for any unwanted visitors.

His dogs were always close by him, barking and growling, wherever he
went.

MIRIAM MorES: When my daughter was little, and I took her for walks, I
would get very frightened if we saw a dog.  Since Auschwitz, I was
terrified of dogs, and I passed this fear onto my child.  She learned
to think they were very dangerous.

One day, my husband took her out, and he noticed how she jumped when
she saw a dog.  She behaved exactly like me.  He told me,

"This is not good.  We have to get a dog for her to get over her
fears."  I refused-and I continued to be afraid of dogs.

I would dream dogs were barking at me, and pursuing me in the night.

They were terrible dreams.  I would cry so loudly that my husband and
children would have to wake me up.

Like a macabre parody of Proust, the gentle French novelist who spent
the last years of his life in a cork-lined room recapturing his youth,
Mengele's only source of pleasure now came from remembrances of his
part.  One day on the radio, he heard an old German hymn, perhaps from
his days as a church-going Catholic in Gtinzburg: "Great God, We Praise
You."  He wrote in his diary, "[W]hat a nice memory.  Another day, he
read a book about Hungary and recalled his travels there as a young
man.  "A lot of old memories: pity that one did not get to know this
country and the people better."

But whatever nostalgia Mengele may have felt for the Hungary of his
youth, he began to treat the Hungarian couple he lived with poorly,
subjecting them to ugly outbursts.  The Stammers came to dread and fear
their erratic "house guest."

Gitta's husband was a sailor, frequently away at sea, and she was left
alone for long periods with Mengele.  She tried her best to create a
pleasant atmosphere for him.  An excellent cook, she would fix him his
favorite dishes, chat with him, and even play the piano for his
enjoyment.  There were even rumors they were lovers.  But instead of
being grateful for her warmth and company, Mengele grew even more
tyrannical, she later claimed in press interviews.  He also became
domineering and irascible toward the servants and other farm help.

On one level, Mengele's mistreatment of the Stammers reflected his
disdain for Slavs, a people the Nazis had considered only slightly
superior to the Jews.  But his rudeness wasn't only a reflection of his
sense of social superiority.  He had treated his Aryan wife Irene much
the same way, ordering her about and subjecting her to his jealous
diatribes.  The pent-up rage Mengele had probably always felt was
manifesting itself in his relationship with the Stammers.  Although he
was both lonely and deeply dependent on them for protection, Mengele
still wanted to feel in control.  The fact that his family's money had
paid for the farm gave Mengele economic power over them, power that he
used indiscriminately.  He even gave the Stammers advice if not
absolute commands-on how they should bring up their young children: He
told them they should be far stricter with them, and discipline them
more often.

Alienated from the Stammers, Mengele turned to his new friend, Wolfgang
Gerhard, for friendship and support.  Gerhard was Mengele's only friend
in his Brazilian retreat.  Gerhard, who had lived in Brazil since the
end of World War II, could advise Mengele on the country and its
inhabitants.  He was also as fanatic and dedicated a Nazi as Mengele.

This was their most important bond, since aside from a shared devotion
to Hitlerian ideals, the two men had little in common.

The crude, lower-class Austrian was certainly not the type of person
Mengele would have associated with back home.  But in the wilderness of
his South American exile, Mengele was glad for any friends he could
get.  Besides, the admiration verging on adoration that Gerhard
lavished on him was salve for his battered ego.

While still a teenager, Gerhard already a passionate devotee of Hitler,
signed up for the German Navy.  He named his oldest son Adolf, and long
after the war had ended and he had left his beloved Austria, he
continued to lament the loss of the glorious Third Reich.

In his house were numerous souvenirs of the Hitler era, including
medals and uniforms.  Gerhard's wife, Ruth, was almost as devout a Nazi
as he.  She once gave their Austrian landlady a gift: two bars of soap
still in their original 1943 wrappers.  They were

"Jew soaps," she'd said-made from the fat of Jews killed in the
concentration camps.

Another of the Gerhards' prized possessions was the large swastika that
topped their Christmas tree every year.  "You always have to take good
care of a swastika," the old Austrian liked to say.  Truly, Mengele
could not have met a more ideal protector.  For Gerhard, watching over
Mengele was a labor of love.

Although Gerhard had introduced Mengele as Peter Hochbichler, Swiss
exile, sometime in 1963 Gitta Stammer realized his true identity.

She stumbled on a newspaper containing a picture of someone with a
striking resemblance to her house guest.  Mrs.  Stammer recalled that
when she confronted him with the photographs,

"Hochbichler" turned white and quickly left the room.  Later that day,
he returned and admitted that he was the notorious Dr.  Mengele of
Auschwitz.

PETER SOMOGYL: When I first met my wife, she immediately noticed the
number tattooed on my arm.  "Were you in Auschwitz?"  she asked me.  I
didn't answer her.  I didn't want to talk about it.

Her father was also a camp survivor, and he had a number on his arm as
well.  She knew what it meant.  I brushed her off, and we both decided
we didn't like each other very much, that first date.

But we went out again with another couple a few weeks later.  It was to
see the opera Don Giovanni.  We realized we both liked classical
music.

Even though she was ten years younger than I, she was very
mature-perhaps because of what happened to her father.

Nevertheless, I continued to refuse to talk about the war with her.

Once, her father asked me about my experiences at Auschwitz, but I
brushed him off as well.

It was a short courtship.  We had met in August, we got engaged in
December, we married the following June.  I wanted to settle down.

I had moved around too much from place to place.

After our honeymoon, when we returned to our new apartment, my wife
said to me,

"Now, will you tell me, please, about your past?

I want to know what happened."

And so I told her in a nutshell about my experiences as a Mengele twin
at Auschwitz.  But only in a nutshell.

We had been married two weeks.  We were starting our new life
together.

I said to my wife,

"I have told you now what happened to me.  Please don't ask me about
that ever again.  I never want to discuss it again."

Afterward, Mengele refused to talk about his past with the Stammers.

According to Gitta, he didn't even like to mention the Second World
War.  Intensely paranoid after his secret was out, Mengele viewed any
unknown visitors to the farm with suspicion.  He was always asking her
about the guests, who they were and what they wanted.

Ironically, visitors to the Stammer farm who met

"Senor Pedro" tended to be charmed by him.  Mengele was exceedingly
polite to strangers, and, when he felt he could trust a person,
friendly and expansive.

Gitta, who endured his constant harping in private, was mystified.  It
seemed to her that Josef Mengele had two sides, "one for strangers, and
the other when he did not need to dissimulate."

HEDVAH AND LEAH STERN: We are like actresses.  Both of us hide our true
feelings.  On the outside, we are laughing and smiling, but inside,
everything is rotten and dark, and will remain so until the end of our
lives.

To new acquaintances, Mengele was the lovable Beppo, a sunny boy grown
into a delightful if somewhat eccentric old man.  Once the guests were
gone, he behaved like a tyrant, given to cursing fits and temper
tantrums.  He was furious if he didn't get his way.  Gitta perceived
the fundamental split in Mengele's personality.  She saw very clearly
the duality, and it frightened and puzzled her.  She was unable to fit
the "twin" sides of Josef Mengele together.  What she didn't know was
that Mengele had always been like this.  At Auschwitz, he would smile
and act kindly, then fly into a rage at the slightest provocation.

And here in Brazil, he had lost all of his power and none of his
madness.

Yet, because Mengele made such a good impression on visitors, the
Stammers had a hard time convincing their friends how irrational their
dapper house guest really was.  Later, they would recall how they would
agonize over the behavior of this strange old man, who seemed both to
yearn for their friendship and to go out of his way to torment, insult,
and abuse them.

The Stammers were coming to realize that they were stuck with their
very difficult house guest.  They couldn't get rid of Mengele, nor
could they persuade him to behave in a more cooperative manner.

Whenever the Stammers complained and suggested a parting of the ways,
Gerhard would arrive to deliver a stern lecture on what an "honor" it
was to lodge the famed SS doctor.  When that approach ceased to work,
Gerhard resorted to threats.  He suggested harm might befall them and
their children if they dared to throw Mengele out of their home.

Eventually, even threats stopped working, and sometime in 1962 the
Mengele family learned of the Stammers' unhappiness with their living
situation.  They quickly dispatched their best factotum, Hans
Sedlmeier, who still enjoyed a top position in the firm, to smooth
matters over.  Clearly, the family wanted to continue the current
arrangement.  It was inexpensive, and they didn't have to worry about
Josefs safety.

In Brazil, Sedlmeier listened sympathetically to the Stammers'
complaints.  Then, believing there was only one way to handle the
distraught Hungarians, he offered them more money.  Sure enough, the
relationship was salvaged, at least for the time being.  After
Sedlmeier's visit, life settled down on the farm.  Mengele continued to
work on his memoirs.  Progress was slow, perhaps because Mengele,
sensing his future was bleak, preferred to linger over the past: He
devoted scores of pages to describing his birth.

But even as Mengele quibbled with Gitta Stammer over the servants, or
agonized about what word to use in his "memoirs," a storm was brewing
in Germany.  During the three years spent preparing for the Frankfurt
trials that got under way in 1964, prosecutors had become convinced of
the enormity of Mengele's crimes.  The German government was prompted
to intensify its search for him.  Perhaps the most dramatic example of
Germany's dedication to the hunt was their decision to have their
ambassador to Paraguay intercede.  In February 1964, Ambassador Eckart
Briest requested an audience with President Stroessner.  In a rare
display of diplomatic passion, he demanded that Paraguay turn over the
infamous death-camp doctor.  Stroessner was so infuriated, he threw the
ambassador out of the country, creating a minor diplomatic crisis.

Because of his close ties to Nazis such as Rudel and Von Eckstein, the
Paraguayan strongman was in a position to know-or find out- Mengele's
whereabouts.  And because foreign citizens were watched very closely,
Stroessner must have had available precise knowledge of Mengele's trips
in and out of Paraguay.  But Stroessner was unwilling to betray a
Nazi.

The Germans were determined that he be brought to book.  But even
without Mengele at the stand, this trial yielded ample testimony about
his conduct at Auschwitz.  The revelations by former inmates who had
worked with Mengele elicited headlines-the first time since the end of
the war that Mengele had received so much notice in his own country.

Even in his own Deutschland, Mengele was now vilified, an object of
loathing.

At the trial, an Israeli doctor named Mauritius Brenner told the German
court how his twin children had been put to death by Mengele because
they were not identical.  His story was confirmed by the Auschwitz
pharmacist, Viktor Capesius.  Before a horrified court, Capesius
recalled bringing the Brenner twins to Mengele, who was in an irritable
mood.  On that day, Mengele didn't want to be bothered with any
fraternal genetic specimens.  "I have no time now," said the Angel of
Death, after throwing a glance at the bewildered children.  They were
promptly taken away to be gassed.  Other witnesses described Mengele's
selections, his affinity for experimenting on cripples, dwarfs, and,
above all, twins.

Germany persisted in its efforts to find the fugitive, and offered a
small reward for Mengele's capture.  Fritz Bauer, the prosecutor who
had helped Israel find Eichmann, made headlines when he alleged that
Mengele had been spotted in Asuncion in the company of Martin
Bormann.

Bauer insisted that Bormann, who was supposed to have died in Hitler's
bunker in 1945, was in fact alive and well in South America.  Bauer
alleged that Hitler's most trusted assistant was good friends with the
Auschwitz doctor.

But as German authorities searched far and wide for clues that might
lead them to Mengele, they seem to have overlooked connections much
closer to home: Hermann Langbein, who had forced Germany to reopen its
Mengele investigation in the late 1950s, was involved in a new
battle.

Langbein hoped to persuade the University of Munich as well as the
University of Frankfurt to revoke the degrees and doctor's license they
had once bestowed on Mengele.

In the spirit of the Frankfurt trials, both institutions seemed
receptive to Langbein's demands.  The man who had killed hundreds of
thousands of people certainly did not deserve the title of "doctor."

The University of Frankfurt, embarrassed about its past as a Nazi
academic haven, promptly agreed.  The University of Munich said it
would follow Frankfurt's cue.

But even as Frankfurt prepared to revoke Mengele's degree, Martha-still
legally his wife, even though they were separated launched a formal
protest.  The battle pitted the universities against a barrage of
tough, highly paid Mengele family lawyers.  In retrospect, it seems
probable that the family was being egged on by Mengele himself, that
Martha's prominent role was due to pressure from her estranged
husband.

Incredibly, however, German authorities never thought to investigate
Martha or the rest of the family at this time, and to demand to know
Mengele's whereabouts.

Indeed, although the Mengele family adopted the party line after the
war that Josef was missing or dead, they came to realize there was no
need to continue the pretense.  Until the Frankfurt trials in the early
1 960s, postwar Germany had not the slightest interest in finding, let
alone trying, the Auschwitz doctor for war crimes.  In a way, the
mysterious Dr.  Mengele was not so elusive after all, at least, not for
many years.  The townspeople of Gunzburg knew that their Beppo was
alive and well and living in South America.  They knew of his divorce
from Irene, and his bizarre marriage to Martha, and they delighted in
gossiping about that union when it, too, failed.  But no one was
especially troubled by the knowledge that the infamous war criminal was
still at large.  None felt a need to come forward and tell all.  More
important, no government authorities-not the Germans, not the Israelis,
not even the Americans-had ever bothered to question them closely until
the mid-1980s, and by then it was too late.

Gently sidestepping the question of whether the aggrieved party was
dead or alive, Martha and the family lawyers kept doggedly appealing
the Case of the Diplomas.  They argued Mengele's degrees couldn't be
repealed because they had been granted before the wa rand hence, before
Mengele had committed his alleged crimes.  But the University of
Frankfurt refused to budge, and ultimately it prevailed.

The loss of his credentials must have been unbearable to the exiled
Nazi.  He could no longer harbor any illusions about returning to his
homeland and his former life.  Never again could he mention his prized
doctorate, never could he try to assume a position in academia, his
lifelong dream.  Mengele's degrees were the last remaining testament of
his former greatness, a reminder of his life before all went awry.

MOSHE OFFER: After I left Blumenthal for the second time, I went back
to school and resolved to change my life.

I decided to become a chemist.  I worked very hard at my studies.

I also got married again, to an Iraqi woman.  I was anxious to have a
real home.  We settled down and had children very quickly.  We had five
daughters, one after the other, and at last the son I had always
wanted.  I named him

"Shai," which means "gift" in Hebrew.

I got my break when I was offered a job in a film laboratory in Tel
Aviv.  This laboratory made photo-developing film.

I was still very inexperienced, but this elderly German professor who
worked there took me under his wing.  He ran the laboratory, and he was
a leading expert in his field.  He taught me day and night.  He gave me
hundreds of pages of notes and formulas to study.

But this professor turned out to be corrupt.  He was stealing silver
used to make the film.  The owners of the laboratory found out about
it.  They let him steal and steal and steal, until they built a case
against him.  One day, detectives came in, and they caught him with six
kilos of silver.

They fired him and gave me his position.  I was placed in charge of the
laboratory.  A lot of people worked under me.  And people all over the
country asked me for advice.  I was an expert, after all the old German
had taught me everything he knew.

Because of my expertise, I became known throughout Israel.  I got a lot
of job offers.  One day, Israeli television offered me a job.  They
offered me a lot of money.  And so I left the laboratory to work for
them.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: After years of struggle, my husband decided to start
his own business.

My uncle helped us buy an apartment for my mother in the same
building.

She lived on the first floor, and we lived on the third floor.  But at
least we lived on our own.  It was wonderful.

I helped my husband a lot in his new business, an electronics
company.

I encouraged him.  I would even type letters for him, because he had
nothing then, neither a secretary nor his own office.  And little by
little, he became successful.  Our lives started to improve.  We were
even able to buy our own house.

We left my mother in the apartment in Netanya, and we moved to another
town.  I wanted to be free of her influence.  I didn't want to live in
the past.

With the Frankfurt trials, Germany atoned for its sins before the rest
of the world.  Once the proceedings were concluded, the Germans never
launched as intensive a hunt for Mengele-or any other war
criminal-again.  As Mengele himself pointed out, many prominent Nazis
continued to be rehabilitated, and resumed positions of importance.

His old mentor, Verschuer, retired from the University of Monster in
1965 after a decade of honors and high praise.  He had succeeded in
building one of the largest genetics institutes in West Germany.

When he spoke publicly on the subject of the Nazi era, he managed to
sound as if he had only been an innocent bystander.

While Verschuer relished the glittering prizes heaped on him, his
former protege spent sleepless nights working on his memoirs.  He also
composed long letters to his family in Germany, as if to make sure they
did not forget him.  He was especially upset when his kinfolk failed
even to acknowledge his birthday.  When he turned sixty, he noted
bitterly that Karl Heinz was the only one to send him a birthday
card.

PETER SOMOGYL: Every year on December 16, I would remember my dead
sister's birthday.

I would think to myself

"Now, she would be this old."  I pictured what she would have been like
if she had survived Auschwitz.  I would imagine what would have
happened if she were still alive, if we still had our family intact.
But I didn't tell anyone my thoughts, not even my wife.

Mengele's greatest source of distress came from Alois, once his
favorite younger brother.  In the postwar years, Lolo had worked very
hard to build up the factory.  The natural heir to Karl Sr Lolo
successfully expanded the family empire.  In the process, he also
earned the reputation of being an exceptionally kind, fair, and
honorable man.  Both in and around Gunzburg, Lolo was liked for his
personal generosity and admired for his sound business sense.

At the start of his brother's exile, Alois had maintained cordial ties
with him, even flying out to Argentina to visit.  But later, Lolo
deliberately sought to distance himself from Josef and barely kept in
contact with him.  A review of Mengele's letters to Alois suggest that
he gave his older brother a hard time about his allowance, even though
there was obviously money to spare.  Since Alois controlled the family
purse strings, Mengele was placed in the humiliating position of
pleading for handouts from his younger brother.

Publicly, Alois Mengele continued to defend his sibling.  But the
townspeople of Gunzburg say that over the years, Lolo became
increasingly disturbed by the persistent stories about Josef's cruelty
and sadism at Auschwitz.  Alois evidently told Josef he had serious
misgivings about what he had done during the war.  According to the
mayor of Gunzburg, Lolo even chose to do his own research, going as far
as to seek out witnesses who could corroborate his brother's version of
events.  But the mere fact that a family member would have doubts about
him distressed Mengele terribly.  The letters suggest there was a large
rift between the two brothers who had once been inseparable, who had
shared a passion for automobiles and pretty women, for swimming parties
along the Danube and evenings in the Cafe Mader.

ZYL THE SAILOR: A few years after the war, I stopped talking with my
twin brother.  We had always fought as children.  We even fought in
Auschwitz-and we continued to fight after the camp.  There were a
million things we didn't agree on.  He didn't like my wife, for
example.  He never accepted her.

Finally, he moved away to America, and I never heard from him again.

I sent him money, letters-but he never replied.  I knew he got them,
because I sent them through registered mail.  I never got an answer.

One day, his wife, who comes to Israel frequently, dropped by to see me
out of the blue.  She said to me,

"Leave your wife.  Come to the States.  We shall help you."

I told her,

"Are you mad?  You come to me after all these years and you ask me to
leave my wife?"

In America, men do things like that-they leave many wives.  What is
that song, about buying a one-way ticket?  The man who drops everything
and leaves.  Or the son who promises to keep in touch, and never sends
his own parents a postcard?  In Israel, family is much more
important.

And even though I was always leaving Israel, I always, always came
back.

MENASHE LORINCZI: My sister and I were very close after the war, but we
drifted apart after she got married.  Her husband was Hassidic-and she
became very religious, too.  I was no longer able to talk to her.  She
adopted all her husband's ideas.

We parted even more when she left for America.  I wrote her letters-and
she never even answered them.

VERA BLAU: My twin sister is my only surviving relative-and I love her,
but with the years I found we had nothing in common.

When I get depressed, I have a "switch," and I can turn it off I switch
it off and I stop feeling sad.

But my sister is always thinking about the Holocaust.  She lives
completely in the past.  I can't bear to see her the way she is now.

There are two forms of theater-comedy and tragedy.  I am a comedy, and
my sister is a tragedy.  She does not even like to laugh-while I enjoy
Mickey Mouse.

And even though we both live in the same city, we hardly ever see each
other.

When Alois developed cancer in the early 1970s, Mengele tried to mend
fences with him.  Upon learning of Lolo's fatal illness, Josef sent him
a long letter expressing his deep sadness.  He conveyed once again his
dismay at the lack of regular contact between them.  He complained he
had only learned of his brother's illness "belatedly" and by chance.

"Perhaps that is also part of my fate," he wrote mournfully, "but now,
I only have the urge to communicate with you, dear brother."

Mengele confessed he had suffered greatly because of the "bizzare"
conduct of his youngest brother.  In a desperate attempt to effect a
reconciliation, Mengele resorted to flattery, telling Alois what a
wonderful job he had done running the factory.  "As a reward for your
exemplary lifestyle and great accomplishments, town has bestowed on you
the title of honorary citizen," he wrote in what was one of his last
letters to Lolo.  "It is a great honor, and I am very happy about the
commemoration of your life's work, which has indeed been exemplary."

Mengele noted how their own father had always thought Lolo could run
the business better than anyone.  He urged his brother to rest, and let
his son and nephew take over the duties.  "You should train your
offspring to work in the business before it is too late," he warned.

Sensing the end was near, Josef thanked his brother for the help he had
provided him over the years.  He stressed how proud he was of Lolo and
his excellence "as a speaker for our family, whose importance you have
so greatly increased."  The contrast between his brother's achievements
and his own shambles of a life wasn't lost on Mengele.

"I am especially happy over the distinction [you've earned] since I am
part of the shadow," he sadly noted.  The letter showed how much
Alois's impending death had affected him.

MOSHE OFFER: With the years, I found myself thinking more and more
about my brother, Tibi.  I pictured Mengele taking him away for the
experiments.

I remembered how sad he was at the end, when he could no longer walk.

I would ask myself,

"Why did I stay alive while he died?"

A twin brother is something very special.  I have a very nice family,
wonderful children.  But I have no one to confide in.  I feel that I want
to say things I could only tell my twin.  Instead, I keep a lot bottled
inside of me.

With the years, I missed Tibi more and more.  I kept wishing he were
alive so I could show off my children to him.  I liked to fantasize
about the wedding he would have had; I wanted very much to see him
happily married.  I thought about the children he would have had.

Most of all, I wanted to introduce him to Shai, my son who is so much
like him.

I would fantasize about this all the time.

Mengele's extreme sense of solitude was alleviated when he made some
new friends.  Gerhard introduced him to an Austrian couple, Wolfgang and
Liselotte Bossert, who were also die-hard Nazis.  Wolfgang had been a
Hitler Youth leader during the war and had retained an abiding respect
for the leader of the Third Reich.  A locksmith by trade, he fancied
himself a philosopher, and genuinely admired Dr.  Mengele.

Bossert considered it an honor to frequent the home of such an
illustrious Nazi.  His wife also enjoyed the company of the urbane,
charming Auschwitz doctor.

The Bossert children "adored" Mengele, Liselotte would later tell the
armies of reporters who swarmed around, asking for information about
Mengele's years in hiding.  Undoubtedly, the Auschwitz doctor was at
his best with the Bosserts' son and daughter, as he had always been
with young children.  And they, in turn, Liselotte said, were
thoroughly captivated by him.  To them, he betrayed none of the mania
that characterized his relationship with adults.  Even as all old man,
Mengele was more at ease with children than with grown-ups.  The
youngsters affectionately called him "Uuo"-little uncle-in a manner
reminiscent of the twins and the Gypsies of Auschwitz.  Both Liselotte
and her husband considered the Angel of Death a good influence on their
family.  They had no qualms about their little ones spending time in
his company.

His new friendship with the Bosserts provided Mengele with a badly
needed social outlet.  He was on intimate terms with the Austrian
couple, and spent entire weekends with them in their beach house or
exploring the countryside.  At night, Mengele and Bossert, with Gerhard
occasionally joining them, sat together chatting.  They talked about
politics, history, and modern-day Germany, which all agreed could not
compare with the mighty Reich.  Mengele's friends were dazzled by his
wide range of knowledge, his ability to quote Greek and Latin texts,
and, of course, the fact that he had once been a great doctor.

OLGA GROSSMAN: I was in the hospital for months-but I hated the doctors
in the white coats so much, I got worse-I rejected treatment.  I wanted
to die.

I missed my children, and they wouldn't let me see them.  I wanted to
go through the walls and run and find my kids.

The doctors were a little afraid of me.  They didn't know how to
approach me.  I would strike at them, sometimes.

I was placed in another hospital, and there I met Dr.  Stern.  She was
a young woman, herself a survivor of the camps.

She was very kind to me.  I didn't feel I was just another patient to
her.  I felt she really cared.  When I met her, I was twenty-five years
old and I felt like a little girl.  I believed she wanted to take care
of me.

She was like a mother to me.

My own mother was a sick woman.  She couldn't cope with my problems.

She had four children still at home, and she didn't have time for me.

She couldn't come to visit me in the hospital as often as I wanted.

Dr.  Stern was so sensitive to my feelings.  For example, whenever she
saw me, she removed her white coat, and stayed in her regular
clothes.

She never let me see her in white because she knew I was afraid of
white coats.  Dr.  Mengele had always worn a white coat when he saw
me.

Under Dr.  Stern's care, I began to change.  I started going out on
walks.  When I had been on many tranquilizers, I had lost a lot of
weight.  Now, I ate more, and even put on a few pounds.  That was
seen as a sign of progress.

I had always been terrified of taking a shower.  I would faint when I
took a shower.  But now, when nurses offered to help me, I refused: "I
am going to take a shower by myself" I would tell them.

I finally made one request to Dr.  Stern: to let me go home and see my
children.  "I promise to come back to the hospital," I told her.  "I
won't run away."  Miraculously, she said yes.  She told me she trusted
me to go and return at a certain time.

I left for a day's visit.  And I found that I wanted to come back.  I
asked Dr.  Stern if I would ever be well enough to leave the hospital
permanently.  "Yes, yes-I promise you that one day, you will go home
for good," she told me.

That's when I resolved to get well.  I told myself

"I am going to get out of here.  With Dr.  Stern's help, I am going to
get better."  At the other hospital, I had wanted to commit suicide.
Here, I wanted to come back simply to see Dr.  Stern.  I felt that she
loved me-I felt I belonged to her.

Little by little, she got me to open up and talk about what had
happened at Auschwitz.

THE SCHOLAR AND THE PREACHER.

I don't like to live in the past.  I don't like to be with other
survivors.

They are always dwelling on the past.  "Do you remember this?  Do you
remember that?"  Oh, no: I don't like that at all.  I don't want to
reopen old wounds.

I went back to my hometown of Cluj, once.  It was my first visit since
the war.

I spent a few days there with my husband.  I walked around.  I went to
the house where I had grown up with Ruthie.  I visited the last
apartment we had lived in before we were deported to Auschwitz.  It was
very sad.

But looking for the past is always very sad, isn't it?  Because we look
and we find nothing-only memories and shadows.  . .

The 1972 Munich Olympics brought back fond memories for Mengele, who,
as a young man of twenty-five, had attended the 1936 games in Berlin, a
shining moment in Nazi history when Hitler had played host to the
entire world.  In a letter to Sedlmeier, Mengele urged him to send over
special reports of certain events, in case they didn't receive adequate
coverage in Brazil.  "I am an old athlete," Mengele proudly reminded
his boyhood friend.

But the games were ruined by the Palestine Liberation Organization's
brutal attack on the Israeli team, an event that seemed to disturb even
the old death-camp doctor.  "Of course, this is not the proper method
either," he lamented in his diary.  Mengele apparently felt that there
was a right way and a wrong way to kill the Jews.  The random terror of
the PLO's Black September faction possibly offended his scientist's
sensibilities.  As a eugenics doctor, Mengele had preferred a more
systematic approach to eliminating the "inferior" race of Jews.

This murderous assault meant that Mengele had nothing to fear from the
Israeli Mossad, which now devoted virtually all of its resources to
infiltrating and rooting out Arab terrorist cells.  Israel had neither
the means nor the inclination to penetrate Nazi circles in South
America.  Besides, it was forging important diplomatic and military
relationships with many of the Latin American states-including those
harboring Nazis: Countries such as Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina,
and Paraguay represented a potentially lucrative market for the Israeli
weapons industry.  These states were also proving to be solid allies at
the United Nations, where a hostile clique of Arab sympathizers was
threatening Israel's very existence.

But the greatest disincentive was the memory of Eichmann's cabture.

The Jewish communities of Latin America had been hurt and punished
then.  Any new operations would be sure to put them at risk.

In Paraguay, for instance, while General Stroessner was willing to
provide protection for a few Jewish families, he made it clear he
didn't appreciate questions about Mengele.  Israel was reminded time
and again that Paraguay was its staunchest friend at the UN.

By the 1970s, the only insistent demands for Mengele's capture were
voiced by Nazi-hunters like Simon Wiesenthal and others, who had made a
career of hunting down war criminals, and who had stalked the Auschwitz
doctor for decades with determination.  From his musty office in
Vienna, crammed with files and guarded by a sullen Austrian police
officer, Wiesenthal liked to think he was keeping up with the elusive
Angel of Death.  He would hold frequent news conferences to announce he
was getting closer to finding Mengele.  The old Nazihunter constantly
claimed to have caught glimpses of him on the run.

A newsletter he published was replete with "updates" on Mengele's
supposed whereabouts.  It was only a matter of time before the infamous
Nazi would be safely in the hands of authorities, Wiesenthal would
confidently proclaim.

But while these reports helped keep the memory of the Auschwitz doctor
alive, Wiesenthal could only have been a minor annoyance for Mengele
and his family.  He was usually so mistaken in his supposed sightings
that he inadvertently helped out Mengele's efforts to remain in
hiding.

More than anyone, Wiesenthal helped foster the image of Mengele as a
glamorous international fugitive, on the run between Argentina, Brazil,
and Paraguay, with occasional jaunts to Europe, and harming anyone who
came too close to him.  Wiesenthal promoted and embellished the tale of
"Nora Eldoc," an Israeli female spy who supposedly befriended Mengele
in a South American resort, and ended up being thrown off a cliff, the
victim of a mysterious "accident."

Probably the single most repeated story involving Mengele, it was
enough to strike fear in the hearts of legions of would-be Mengele
hunters.

There was in fact very little glamour in Mengele's life, and a great
deal of misery.  The Olympics aside, 1972 proved to be rather a bad
year.  As a result of his obsessive worrying, which led him to chew
nervously on his mustache, Mengele developed bezoars, hairballs in his
stomach.  This unusual condition, common to cats-and psychotics-was
acutely painful and required surgery.  Terrified of being discovered,
Mengele approached a surgeon at a local Sao Paulo hospital using his
alias, Peter Hochbichler.  When the doctor ordered extensive X rays,
Mengele insisted on having access to all of them.

To the doctor's surprise, Mengele warned him not to make any extra
copies of the films.  The surgery was succesful, and Mengele made
certain to retrieve all copies of his medical records.

According to Gitta Stammer, even after his convalescence, Mengele
seldom left the house.  The bulk of his time was spent reading and
working on his memoirs, which by then had evolved into an
autobiographical novel.  Occasionally, he socialized with the
Bosserts.

When his brother Lolo finally succumbed to cancer in 1974, Mengele felt
more alone than ever.  His relatives in Gunzburg were deluged with his
lengthy letters.

With old age, Mengele's paranoid tendencies were becoming even more
pronounced.  His frequent letters home were written in a tortuous,
virtually illegible script.  He employed an elaborate code to disguise
the names of people and places-but it was so arcane that he was the
only one who understood it.  His family, annoyed by the endless cryptic
references, asked him to be more direct-and more succinct.  They
pointedly suggested that postcards would do as well in maintaining the
relationship.  But Mengele of course refused: He would have been robbed
of his chief source of pleasure.  His family then pleaded with him to
type out the letters.  Sedlmeier himself intervened to ask Mengele both
to keep the letters brief and to space them out more.  And Bossert sent
him a note urging him not to use "so much code language in your letters
. Make them so they are understandable to idiots, so we can all avoid
the constant misunderstandings."

A special, top-secret arrangement had been worked out to get letters to
and from Mengele.  As with all sensitive matters involving Josef,
Sedlmeier was the trusted intermediary, overseeing the scheme that
allowed the war criminal to stay in touch with his family.  Mengele
would send his letters to a post-office box in Switzerland, and
Sedlmeier made regular trips to pick them up, making sure they reached
the parties to whom they were addressed.  Any mail to Mengele also went
through Sedlmeier, who sent it to a post office box in Brazil.  This
complicated arrangement kept up the connection Mengele so desperately
wanted with his family.  Alas, his nieces and nephews didn't feel any
strong obligation to respond to the voluminous correspondence.

Family members adopted Lolo's technique of simply not answering.

The infrequent mail from home was a source of anguish for Mengele.

There were times when his Gunzburg relatives didn't even bother to
retrieve the letters he sent them.  "I always feel hurt when I become
aware that no one is picking up my mail," he complained to someone
code-named

"Kitt."

"Your neglect is a source of great pain to me.

Despite the family's cold shoulder, Mengele retained a passionate
concern with trivia and idle Gunzburg gossip.  Like a spinster aunt
with no life of her own, Mengele kept close track of the romances and
little domestic squabbles, the weddings, pregnancies, and births in his
boyhood town.  "I heard a rumor that Dieter [Lolo's son] is going to be
married," he writes to Sedlmeier.  "Who is the lucky girl?"  In the
same letter, he sends warm wishes to a boyhood chum whose son has just
become a doctor.  "If I had to choose again, I would choose the same
profession," the Auschwitz doctor blithely observes.

"Congratulations."

MOSHE OFFER: Happy occasions are the worst times of the year for me.

Instead of feeling cheerful.  I feel lost, remembering all the people
who aren't here with me.

I become so depressed, I find myself thinking I would have been better
off if I had died along with my brother at Auschwitz.

When I held my son's bar mitzvah, it was like a day of mourning for
me.

It was like a funeral.

I kept thinking about my dead brother, about all my family.  "Why
aren't they here with me?"  I kept thinking.  "Why am I all alone?"

PETER SOMOGYL: When my son was bar mitzvahed, it was supposed to be a
very happy event for me-after all, he was my first-born son.  But I
could not stop crying.

We were all crying.

JUDITH YGUDAH: Holidays and special occasions are the hardest.  Here in
Israel, everyone has a big family they can celebrate with.  But we have
no extended family.

My husband has no surviving sisters or brothers.  And I don't have
Ruthie.

My children would often ask,

"Why don't we have cousins?"

HEDVAH AND LEAN STERN: During joyful occasions, we feel sad.  If
there's a bar mitzvah, or a wedding for our sons or daughters, we think
of our mother instead.  We remember her saying good-bye to us, and we
get depressed.

But by 1975, Mengele had enough problems on his own home turf to worry
too much over events in distant Gunzburg: His loyal friend and
protector Gerhard decided to leave Brazil, and Gitta Stammer resolved
to kick Mengele off the farm.  In Gerhard's case, both his wife, Ruth,
and their son were dying of cancer.  He hoped that by moving them back
to Austria, there might be a better chance at a cure than in Brazil.

Before he left, Gerhard gave his friend an invaluable gift: his
identity papers.  Sixty-four-year-old Josef Mengele, alias Peter
Hochbichler, became fifty-year-old Wolfgang Gerhard.

But Mengele's other guardians, the Stammers, proved less charitable at
the end.  "You are not in any position to push me around," Gitta once
told Mengele, alluding to his status as a wanted man.

Although she didn't follow through on her veiled threats to expose him,
she made it clear he would need a new home.  She was going to sell the
farm, buy herself a house, and devise a separate living arrangement for
the death-camp doctor.  Her days as a caretaker were over.

That same year, Mengele left the Stammers' residence and moved into his
own house.  Home for the Gunzburg heir was a small, shack like
structure in one of Sao Paulo's more decaying neighborhoods.  As a
final favor, the Stammers had chosen the residence themselves, had
purchased it, and rented it to Mengele.  And with the profit they made
from selling their own farm-originally purchased with money provided by
the Mengele family-Gitta and Geza bought a splendid villa in an
affluent section of Sao Paulo.  It was a small enough reward for the
years they had harbored the erratic Dr.  Mengele.

Forced to live alone, Mengele felt more and more afraid.  A small
stroke that he suffered in 1976 added to his sense of helplessness.  He
was paralyzed for a brief period, and although he regained most of his
faculties, his writings suggest he was deeply shaken.  In his own
apartment, cut off from the few friends he could claim, Mengele was a
desperately unhappy man.

It was around this period that Mengele sought to improve his stormy,
on-again, off-again relationship with his son.  Rolf Mengele had become
demonstrably cooler to his father than the rest of the family ever
since he'd discovered his identity.  One Christmas, when Rolf was still
a young boy, Mengele had remarked on the difference between his son and
his stepson, Karl Heinz.  "The letter from Karl Heinz was very
sweet-the one from Rolf was too factual."  Now in his thirties, Rolf
was still ambivalent toward his father.

In the 1970s, Mengele's letters to Rolf were replete with advice, stern
warnings, and dire prophecies of failure.  He displayed the same need
to dominate that had characterized his relationships with friends-and
with Rolf's mother, Irene.  And not surprisingly, the more Mengele
sought closer contact, the more he seemed to alienate his son.

Indeed, it would seem that Mengele had become almost a parody of the
engulfing maternal figure who had haunted his life.  Sharp alternances
in sentiment and mood characterized Mengele's correspondence with his
son.  In the space of a single letter, he could veer from affection to
abuse, from a show of warmth to an outburst of rage.

MOSHE OFFER: There are times I get so angry, I beat up my son.  I get
in such a rage, I don't know what I'm doing.  I can't control my
temper.  I start throwing things and smashing furniture.  I beat anyone
who is near me.

Anything can trigger my rages-even a little thing, like a messy room in
the house.

My second wife, Miriam, knew nothing about my past when she married
me.

She might not have married me if she had.

I used to beat her a lot.  She was very frightened when I hit her or
the children.  But she knew I was not to blame.

When I calm down, I feel very bad.  I tell my wife and my children I am
sorry.  I ask them for forgiveness.  I beg them to understand.

As a long-distance father, Mengele managed to be both intrusive and
critical.  He probed for information on his son's personal life, even
suggesting the types of women Rolf should date and marry.  In one
letter, he urged Rolf to let his intellect guide his relationships with
women.  "Rational observance" and not "emotion" should be used to
select a mate.  The old racial hygienist even threw in a brief
discourse on genetics, listing the traits Rolf should look for in a
wife.  He cited, not surprisingly, good genetic stock as the number-one
requirement.

He urged Rolf to investigate a girl's family for its "rank and
reputation."

After that, her wealth naturally had to be taken into account.

But Mengele didn't limit himself to prying into his son's romances.

He also injected his views on Rolf's work and career prospects, often
expressing disapproval.  His letters suggest he thought his son was
shallow and superficial.  "You and your generation have not been
educated to survive," he wrote at one point.  Mengele faulted Rolf for
being too materialistic-for desiring money, cars, and other comforts.

But not all of Mengele's letters to Rolf were angry.  In between the
admonitions and advice, the incessant demands and harsh rebukes, he
displayed a deep love for his son.  In one letter, he reminisced
about a day he was home taking care of Rolf, then just an infant.

"There was an air raid, and I took you in my arms and ran to the bomb
shelter," Mengele recalled.  "The worrying and responsibility I felt
for you as a child are still with me, as if it were yesterday," he
wrote.

HEDvAH AND LEAH STERN: When we became mothers, we were so
overprotective, we never let our children out of our sight.  Our lives
were completely devoted to them.

For example, when they came home from school, they would sit down at
the table and have their meals served on the spot-on the spot.

Occasionally, friends invited us to go out to dinner or to see a
movie.

But we would never go out with our husbands and leave the children with
a baby-sitter.  Either we went out or our husbands did but we never
left the house together.

HEDvAH STERN: One day, my son told me,

"Look, Mom, you can go out with Daddy and leave me by myself-I'm a big
boy now.  I'll watch over the other children."  He was ten years old at
the time.  But I simply couldn't deal with the thought of going out
with my husband and leaving the children alone.  I couldn't cope with
that. I left the house-but I felt frightened the whole evening.

OLGA GROSSMAN: When my children were young, I would not let them leave
my side.  I needed to have them near me constantly.  I was obsessed
with them.

Having them close by was like being able to breathe.  After I saw them
off to school in the morning, I collapsed.

There were days I wouldn't even let them go to school.  I made them
stay home with me, instead.  They'd get embarrassed.  "Mommy, we have
run out of excuses," they would tell me.  "What are we going to tell
our teachers?"

But I didn't care.

Perhaps I was feeling guilty for all the time I had left them alone
when they were small, and I had to be hospitalized.  My conscience was
killing me.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: I have two children-a boy and a girl.  I worry about
them constantly.

I always feel afraid for them.  I am a burden on them, I am sure.

PETER SOMOGYL: I worried constantly about my children.  When they went
away, I insisted they call home every day.  I needed to have copies of
their class schedules, their school schedules-I always had to know
exactly where they were.

If they didn't call for a couple of days I would tell my wife,

"What's the matter with the children-let's call them."

I was always terrified I would be separated from them.

Mengele took out his frustration about his own failed career on Rolf,
who was struggling to lead the appearance of a normal life.  When Rolf
informed his father he was not going to finish his Ph.  D. in law,
Mengele became livid.  It wasn't enough that his son was already a
professional, a trained lawyer assured of a good future.  The man who
had earned two advanced degrees, then endured the humiliation of seeing
them taken away, seemed determined that his son should gain back the
professional standing he himself had lost.  A major argument erupted
between father and son.  In vain, Rolf tried to list the reasons he had
abandoned his dissertation.  He lacked the money to finish.  He was no
longer interested in the subject matter.  He was tired.

Mengele promptly sent a scathing letter to his son.  "I accept that you
lack interest and are not willing to work-but I do not accept that you
don't have enough money," Mengele wrote, apparently forgetting that
Rolf had no claim to the family fortune.  After the war, Mengele had
signed papers relinquishing any share in the estate.  Mengele went on
to point out how foolish it was for Rolf to drop out at such a late
stage, "especially as you have studied so many semesters, and have
three years of training."  Deeply upset, he remarked, "I do not have
the proper words to express my feelings.  I was very hurt.  The
doctorate was the only desire I ever had for you.

In his longing for his son to recoup the respect he had lost, Mengele
failed to realize that Rolf had inherited neither his intellect nor his
fierce drive and ambition.  In spite of the guilt his father made him
feel, Rolf abandoned his doctoral thesis, and decided to practice law
instead.  He eventually opened a small law practice in Freiburg.

It was a modest path for a man of modest ambitions.  Dr.  Mengele's son
was to exhibit several of his father's traits as he grew older, from
his charm to his obsessive-compulsive qualities, but the burning
ambition, the deep need to achieve, was never among them.  Rolf settled
instead for a quiet existence near his mother, shunning both Gunzburg
and the Mengele clan.  Irene herself had little or no dealings with the
Mengeles.  Whether she actively encouraged a relationship between Rolf
and his father, or chose simply not to stand in the way, is unclear.

The relationship between father and son took a decided turn for the
better in 1976, when Rolf became engaged to a blonde of good Aryan
stock.  It would be his second marriage; his first, to a pretty
brunette who had been his childhood sweetheart, had lasted less than a
year.  Dr.  Mengele was delighted with his son's new choice of mate.

Almuth Jenkel was a stunning beauty, with long flaxen hair and big blue
eyes-a modern version of the Hitlerian ideal.  The large breasts and
athletic look of the 1930s poster girls were out.  Fashion now dictated
a delicate, more slender type of Aryan womanhood, which Almuth
embodied.

Best of all, she was a twin.  "Mengele was both fascinated and
delighted with the fact that his own son had married a twin," Rolf
would later recall.  Mengele grilled him about her genetic
background.

Evidently satisfied, he extolled the benefits of the union from another
genetic point of view.  "For the first time, one of our own has gotten
his wife from north of the Main line," he exulted in a letter to
Rolf.

While his family came from southern Germany, Mengele, like other racial
hygienists, believed the best genetic traits were to be found in the
northern regions.  "This movement north of the border is to be
welcomed, and one can only expect the best from this new match."

Indeed, he told his son he hoped his daughter-in-law would bear twin
grandchildren.  "Even the characteristic of Almuth as a nonidentical
twin was of special interest to me," Mengele noted in his journals.

And it is possible that Rolf was also trying to please this father he
hardly knew but who had haunted his childhood and youth.  If nothing
else, it was considerably easier to wed the lovely Almuth than to
finish a tedious dissertation.

OLGA GROSSMAN: My daughter fell in love with a Canadian boy and decided
to marry him and move to Canada.  She settled in Calgary, near the
North Pole.

I knew even then that she was running away from me-from my past.  She
had been forced to live with it since she was a baby.  It was very
difficult for her, and so I guess she did what she could to survive:
She moved as far away from me as possible.

But once she got there, she realized the bond we had as a family was
much too precious.  She wanted to have children-but she couldn't bear
the thought of her parents not knowing their own grandchildren.

And so, her marriage suffered.

At about the time of Rolf's engagement, Mengele expressed a longing to
see his son-a request he had made repeatedly over the years.

The two had not met since the 1956 holiday in Switzerland, when Rolf
hadn't known the handsome Uncle Fritz was really his father.  Mengele's
son hesitated; the relationship had been so troubled over recent years,
as far as he was concerned, it might best be left to letters and
photographs.  Ultimately, pity and curiosity prompted Rolf to change
his mind-pity for the father who was old and sick, and curiosity to
better know the man who had been widely depicted as a monster.

Preparations for the trip to Brazil were hampered by the ambivalence
both father and son felt about the trip.  Josef kept dictating
elaborate security precautions.  Rolf kept postponing the date of the
voyage.

Once again, as with all family crises involving Mengele, Hans Sedlmeier
stepped in.  The perfect diplomat, Sedlmeier encouraged Rolf to follow
through on his resolve by reminding him that his father was still badly
shaken by a recent stroke: His last desire was to see his son.

Sedlmeier told Mengele, meanwhile, that his son was of a different
generation, and that he should not expect too much of him.

PETER SOMOGYL: One day, I was leafing through Life magazine, and I
nearly jumped: There was Twins' Father-both his picture and an article
about him.

There was also an old photograph of my brother and [me], taken when we
got back to Hungary after the war.  We had mailed it to Twins' Father
to let him know we had arrived safely.

My wife and I were living in America at this time.  We had left Canada
for the U.S. during the turbulent period of the Quebec Separatist
movement.  Many Canadian Jews had panicked and fled Montreal-including
my wife's family.  They felt very strongly that we should move, too.

As I read the article, I got more and more nervous.  I was gasping for
air.

The next morning, I called up the magazine.  I asked them for Twin's
Father's address: They didn't know it.  I called up the Israeli embassy
in Washington.  "Can you give me his address?"  I begged them.

They informed me there were five Zyl Spiegels in Tel Aviv.  "Give me
all five," I said.

I wrote to all five of them.  And sure enough, he sent me back a
letter.  He told me his daughter was living in Brookline,
Massachusetts, and that he was planning to visit her.  That's how we
arranged to meet.

OLGA GROSSMAN: When my daughter separated from her husband, I decided I
had to see her through the divorce.  I decided to go to Canada and live
with her for a while, and help her overcome her depression.

When I left for Canada, I was terrified.  It was extremely difficult to
leave my husband, my son, and Dr.  Stern.  But I said to myself

"My child needs me: Now is the time I can offer her my help."

I left my family for three months and went to stay with my daughter.

At last, a date for the trip was set, airline tickets were purchased.

So as not to endanger his father, Rolf would travel with a false
passport.

In May 1977, Rolf flew from Germany to Rio de Janeiro and traveled from
there to Sao Paulo.  Although he was employing an alias-the passport he
used was actually a friend's-he was constantly afraid he was being
followed, and would unknowingly lead authorities to his father.

OLGA GROSSMAN: I arrived in Canada at the worst time of the year.

There was so much snow.  It was beautiful-but it reminded me of
Auschwitz.  I settled in my daughter's apartment.  When she left for
work each morning, I would go do the shopping.

One day, I was caught in a terrible snowstorm.  I was very
frightened.

That's when I told myself

"I am going to bring my daughter back home-where she belongs."

And that's exactly what I did.  I brought her back to Israel.

PETER SOMOGYL: The day Twins' Father arrived, he called me on the
telephone to arrange a date when we could meet.  I was working, and it
was hard for me to get away.  We thought I should come up to Boston on
the weekend but I was extremely nervous.  "I'll leave work now, and
I'll come up and meet you," I told him.

I told my boss I had to leave, ran out of the office, got in my car,
and started driving to Massachusetts.

When I arrived at his daughter's house in Brookline, I found a lot of
reporters waiting for me outside.  The neighbors had thought this would
be an interesting reunion, and they had called the press.  But I walked
straight past the cameras into the house.

We didn't say a word to each other-not a single word.  We simply
hugged.

He had changed: It had been so many years.  His wife was crying in one
corner-his daughter was crying in another corner.

According to Rolf, the reunion was tender and sentimental.  Mengele's
"child" was thirty-three; Josef was sixty-six, ailing, and seemed much
older.  During Rolf's stay, the old Nazi was often on the verge of
tears, so glad was he to be reunited with his son again.  In interviews
given years later, Mengele's son depicted his father as warm and
loving.

"You surely do not believe what has been said about me?"  Rolf said his
father asked when questioned about Auschwitz.  It was then that Dr.
Mengele swore "by my mother's eye" he had never "personally" killed
anyone.

The rest of the trip was warm and familial.  Their two weeks together
were crammed with sightseeing trips, family gossip, and even some
political discussions.  At one point, Mengele and his son argued about
the death penalty.  Josef was in favor of it; his son was firmly
opposed to it.

Dr.  Mengele seemed anxious to be at his best.  He proudly took his son
around to meet his friends the Bosserts.  They also ran into the
Stammers during one of their outings.  Although they were estranged
from Mengele, the Hungarian couple was all smiles when they posed with
Rolf for pictures.  Mengele even played tour guide and showed Rolf the
country he had reviled for nearly twenty years.  In an effort to woo
Rolf, he offered him the use of the lone bed in the house, while he
slept on the floor.  And perhaps it was to woo the public that
Mengele's son recounted this incident over and over again, as if to
show there was another, more human side to his father.

On the last day, the two took a trip to Bertioga Beach, where the
Bosserts had their cottage.  The weather was idyllic, and father and
son relished their final hours together.  Both sensed it would be the
last time they would see each other.  The next morning, Mengele
insisted on escorting Rolf to the airport in Sao Paulo, in spite of the
risks.  But so as not to attract attention, the farewells were brief
and somewhat impersonal.

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.

Bossert remembered urging him to see a doctor.  But Mengele took the
friendly advice as an insult.  "I know you would be very relieved if I
were not around any longer," he reportedly snapped.  But after lunch,
Mengele was in a much more cordial mood.  The two men even had a good
discussion.

According to the Bosserts, that afternoon, while swimming, Josef
Mengele suffered a stroke.  The water was stormy, and he was only able
to move one arm.  The Bossert's son was the first one to notice Mengele
was in trouble.  "Come back, Uncle," he cried, "the ocean is pulling
you in."  The children watched in horror as their tit io struggled,
gasping for breath.  Their father tried in vain to revive him, but it
was too late.  Dr.  Mengele was dead.

The Bosserts tried their best to keep the drowning a secret, although
the cose attracted some attention on the small Brazilian beach.  A
lifeguard on the scene became suspicious at the discrepancy between the
age of the man on the ID card and the much older corpse in front of
him.  But the couple who had shielded Mengele so skillfully when he was
alive now managed to do so after he had died: Liselotte saved the day
by quickly retOrting their friend had suffered from an illness that
"made him age remarkably."

At the beach that evening, the Bosserts say they held an elaborate
ceremony in memory of the Angel of Death.  There were candles and
incense, prayers and hymns chanted under the stars.  A wreath of red
roses was placed gently on Mengele's body, while strangers who had
gathered on the beach beseeched God to show mercy to the departed.

When I went back to Auschwitz in January 1984, I kept looking for
clues-something that would help me understand how my parents had
died.

I had a deep need to know what happened.

As I walked through the camp, I finally understood.  I saw the path
from the railroad tracks to the gas chamber, and I understood how a
person could disappear from the face of the earth.

If you take a loved one who dies and bury them in a cemetery, you know
you can go back and visit them.  But for Miriam and me-for all the
Auschwitz twins-there was no cemetery.  There was only a memory of that
last time we had seen our mother, our father, our sisters.

At Auschwitz, I felt at last I was at their gravesite.

In December 1979, Rolf Mengele says, he returned to Brazil to pay his
last respects to the father he had hardly known.  It had taken him
months to save up money for the air fare.  Rolf visited the cemetery in
Embu where Mengele was buried under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, whose
identity he had adopted four years earlier.  Rolf recalled thinking how
ironic it was that his father, champion of the Aryan race, lay next to
an Oriental in a small, forlorn gravesite.

Much of Rolf's trip was devoted to tidying up his father's estate.

The Bosserts and Stammers, who had liquidated most of the property,
were anxious to know what to do with the proceeds.  The few pieces of
furniture, books, and knicknacks the old Nazi had collected were hardly
worth very much, and Rolf decided to let them keep the meager amount
their sale had brought.  In addition, he gave them his dead father's
savings of about a thousand dollars.  It was a small thank-you for the
years both families had spent harboring the war criminal.

What Rolf cared about most, he later asserted, were the papers his
father had left behind-the hundreds of pages of notebooks, diaries,
calendars, and letters covered margin-to-margin with Mengele's
tortuous, barely legible script.  Rolf returned to Germany anxious to
review his father's writings.  In the quiet hours, he pored over them,
in search of some special message intended just for him, even a small
note addressed "to my son"-but there was none.  Mengele's son also
combed the papers for clues to the enigma that was his father.  But
that search, too, proved to be disappointing.  There was far, far less
of a personal nature in the papers than he had hoped.

Rolf and other family members say they decided to keep Josefs death a
secret, telling only immediate relatives and a handful of intimate
friends that the old Auschwitz doctor had drowned on a Brazilian
beach.

What were the motives of the Mengele family for keeping the secret of
the grave for so many years?  Explanations vary.  Some have speculated
that the family kept silent simply because it did not want to open the
Pandora's box that did in fact open when news of Mengele's death was
finally made public.  Rolf Mengele himself insisted that his family
merely wanted to protect the many people Germans Austrians, Hungarians,
Italians, Brazilians, and others who along the way had protected his
father over the years.

Life went on for the rest of the Mengeles.  The once-lovely Martha
retired to Merano, a small town in northern Italy.  She never
remarried.

She now leads a quiet life, reportedly traveling to Gunzburg only for
family gatherings.  Even in her old age, there are still traces of her
former beauty; she supposedly likes to wear elegant, formfitting gowns
that show off her beautiful figure to its best advantage.  Intensely
private, Martha declines all requests for interviews, and has never
publicly discussed her life with Mengele.  Her son, Karl Heinz, who is
now running the Mengele factory along with his cousin Dieter, is just
as silent, just as discreet about his stepfather.

Mengele's first-and perhaps only-love, Irene Schoenbein, leads a
similarly solitary existence in her native Freiburg.  She divorced her
second husband, Alfons Hackenjos, several years ago, and He has since
died.  But through the years, she has continued to speak well of Josef,
and has admitted to a journalist or two that she had been deeply in
love with him as a young girl.  If she was ever troubled by his wartime
activities, she never publicly revealed her misgivings.  A car
accident in the 1970s left her incapacitated and nearly homebound.

She keeps to herself, choosing to live in a large, secluded house with
a tall gate designed to keep out all nitruders.

Rolf claims he felt strangely relieved after his father's death.  At
last, Mengele's son could begin to lead his OWn life, free of the
constant emotional invectives and threats his father had made over the
years.

With Dr.  Mengele lying in a grave thousands of kilometers away in
South America, Rolf could even please and honor him in small ways.

Every blond, blue-eyed child Almuth bore was like a tribute to his
father.

But as if on the whim of some prankish god, 1979, the year Mengele's
friends claim he died, was also the year when the public's interest in
finding him was most vigorously renewed.  Everyone from professional
Nazi-hunters and Holocaust survivors to members of Congress was
suddenly expressing a passionate desire to see Mengele brought to
book.

Possibly as a result of the new interest in him, the Auschwitz Angel
of Death was now spotted regularly in bustling Latin cities and dense
jungles south of the Amazon.  He was handsome and dashing as ever,
witnesses said, as he shuttled around the triangle border area of
Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.

For years, Simon Wiesenthal and others had been pointing the finger at
Paraguay.  At around this time, Wiesenthal was joined by a new and
dynamic breed of Nazi hunters, led by the husband-and-wife team of
Serge and Beale Klarsfeld.  Serge, a French Jew, and Beale, a German
Gentile, didn't just stop at condemning the South American dictator who
harbored Nazis.  They traveled to their countries and waged fiery
demonstrations.  The Klarsfelds, like Wiesenthal, insisted the regime
of General Alfredo Stroessner was harboring the war criminal.  As a
result of the clamor, Congress joined the fray, urging the State
Department to apply pressure on the Paraguayan government.

Stroessner and his deputies had always maintained they knew nothing
about Mengele's whereabouts.  But the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay,
Robert White, was inclined not to believe a regime that was one of the
world's worst human-rights violators.  Convinced that the government
that had once granted the Auschwitz doctor citizenship was protecting
him still, White was certain that Mengele was living somewhere in the
vicinity of Asuncion.  He took to wandering alone through the German
establishments of the capital in search of information, and sent
regular cables to Washington detailing the progress of his "hunt."

In a surprise move that year, the Paraguayan government caved in to
pressure and revoked Mengele's citizenship-some two decades after
granting it to him.  It was a gesture clearly intended to appease
critics of the Stroessner regime, particularly those in Washington.

That same year, one of the strangest reports ever concerning Mengele
arrived by way of the State Department's secret channels.  The embassy
in Asuncion had learned, ostensibly from good sources, that Dr. 
Mengele would be flying to Miami, Florida, on a Delta Airlines
flight.

Although information was sketchy, reservations were found to have been
made under his name.  The bizarre report was taken seriously at the
highest levels of the State and Justice Departments, and a major effort
was launched to arrest Mengele when he landed.  Classified cables
flowed back and forth between Washington and Asuncion.  The matter even
reached the desk of then-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.  It was Vance
who gave the orders to arrest Mengele when he arrived in Miami.

But, of course, Josef Mengele never boarded the Delta flight.  FBI
agents who were poised to nab him at the Miami airport returned,
empty-handed and disappointed, to their headquarters.  They
subsequently filed a report dismissing the incident as a probable
hoax.

But no one was ever able to explain the mysterious reservations made
under Mengele's name.

"If I could get this man, then my soul would finally be at peace,"

Simon Wiesenthal liked to tell friends and colleagues.  He continued to
tantalize the world with fantastic tales of the Auschwitz doctor.  One
day, Mengele would be spotted in a Mennonite community, deep in the
heart of Paraguay.  The next, he was in Bolivia, fraternizing with
Klaus Barbie; the Angel of Death and the Butcher of Lyons were rumored
to be on excellent terms.  A priest spotted him on the Brazilian
border.  A Holocaust survivor swore she had seen Mengele shopping in
her store in downtown Asuncion.  Uruguay had asked him to train its
police force.  Stroessner had summoned him for expert medical advice.

The CIA had reports he was involved in the international narcotics
trade.  He was rumored to be best friends with another missing Nazi,
Martin Bormann.  He was dying of cancer.  He had just had a
face-lift.

He looked haggard and worn out from his years on the run.

Mengele was seen here and there, everywhere and nowhere.  The more
Wiesenthal floated reports about Mengele's supposed whereabouts, the
more elusive the Angel of Death seemed to be.

The 1980s brought a resurgence of interest in the Holocaust.  In 1983,
the first national conference for survivors in Washington attracted
some fifteen thousand victims of Hitler's death camps.  They gathered
to search for loved ones and friends and relive the horror.

Many spoke for the first time about their experiences.  They crowded
around specially installed computer banks crammed with names of
survivors hoping to find a long-lost relative.  The historic three-day
reunion prompted an appearance by President Ronald Reagan, who made a
moving speech about America's responsibility to remember the Nazi
slaughter of the Jews.

Attending the gathering was Mengele's child-victim Alex Dekel, who was
in Washington to lobby members of Congress about Mengele.

Obsessed with finding the war criminal, Dekel wanted the United States
Congress to pressure Paraguay to turn over Mengele.  But within weeks
of the gathering, Alex died-and with him, it seemed, any resolve to
capture the missing death-camp doctor.

But the following year, Eva Mores, a surviving twin who had also been
in Washington, earnestly took up Alex's cause.  She and her sister,
Miriam, decided it was time the world should learn the story of the
Auschwitz children.  From her home in Terre Haute, Indiana, Eva sent
letters to five hundred prominent American journalists and newspapers,
urging them to write about the missing Auschwitz doctor and his
child-victims, the twins.  For months, she waited for a reply to her
anxious requests.  One day, her photocopied letter reached the desk of
nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.  Anderson received
thousands of letters a week, and often turned them over to his team of
investigative reporters.  Struck by the poignancy of Eva's letter,
Anderson associate Lucette Lagnado decided to contact the Indiana
housewife.  In the course of several emotional phone conversations, Eva
told Lagnado of her childhood experiences as a surgical guinea pig, the
brutal loss of her parents and sisters in the gas chambers of
Auschwitz, and life with Dr.  Mengele.

EVA MOZES: Over the years, I had had so many nightmares about
Auschwitz.  I was always thinking about Mengele, about the camp, about
the other twins.

I had read many of the books about Auschwitz, but to my great sorrow
they never mentioned Mengele and the twins, except in passing.

I had a very personal need to search for the twins.  I wanted to
understand what had been done to Miriam and me-to know why she was ill
so often, why I had so many problems.

I thought that maybe if I could locate the twins, we could sit down and
piece together what had happened to us in the concentration camp.

And then one day, it occurred to me that there was one person who knew
exactly what was done to us-Dr.  Mengele.  I found out that Mengele had
been free since the end of the war.

I thought,

"That is impossible."

In Israel, Eva's sister, Miriam, was equally intent on locating other
twins.  With the help of a relative who worked at Ma'Ariv, one of
Israel's leading dailies, Miriam placed a small ad asking any child
survivors of Mengele's experiments to contact her.  Within days, she
was flooded with calls and letters from twins longing to see each other
again.  A reunion was quickly arranged.

HEDvAH STERN: I had been waiting for this moment-for someone to bring
up what had happened.  The wound was there, and it reopened.

LEAN STERN: I kept crying-shouting and crying.  "Why, why, why didn't
anyone do this before?"  I blamed the world for the fact that no one
had ever taken notice of us.

MOSHE OFFER: There were so many of us still around-some had been hurt
less, some were hurt more.  I went to the reunion thinking that all the
twins who underwent experiments at Mengele's hands were suffering.  And
their children were suffering.  And they would suffer for generations
to come.

We wanted to know what had been done to us.  We felt the world should
research the injections and surgeries we had undergone.

ZYL THE SAILOR: I walked in thinking,

"I should know half the people in this room."  A pair of twins
immediately came up to me, and said hello.

They told me,

"How could we forget you-you and your brother were always fighting."
And one of them remembered not only my name, but my number-and even my
twin's number.  I checked my arm, and sure enough, it was the same as
he remembered.

JUDITH YAGUDAH: As the years passed, I had tried not to think about
Auschwitz at all.

I tried to push it back and live in the present.

On the other hand, whenever a book about the Holocaust came out, I ran
to get it.

Auschwitz was in me-like a heavy parcel I had to drag around all the
time.

After the reunion, I felt very sad.  I had a very hard week.  I thought
about Ruthie a lot.  I talked with my mother about her.  I told my
children stories about her.  I lit a candle for her.

Buoyed by the discovery of nearly a hundred twin survivors, Eva and
Miriam decided to form CANDLES, an organization whose sole purpose
would be to publicize the plight of Mengele's child victims.

Parade magazine's publication in September 1984 of Anderson's feature
story on the Auschwitz twins helped focus the spotlight on CANDLES.

Thousands of readers around the United States sent contributions, and
other journalists also were spurred to begin writing about the unusual
group.  The attention prompted Eva and Miriam to plan the most dramatic
project ever undertaken by a group of survivors: a return to the death
camp.

In January 1985, CANDLES traveled to Auschwitz to commemorate the
fortieth anniversary of the camp's liberation from the Nazis.

Led by the Mores sisters, twins from Israel and America braved once
again the frigid Polish winter and their own demons for a walk through
Auschwitz.  Journalists from around the world descended on it to hear
the forty-year-old story of the twins' ordeal under the abominable Dr.
Mengele.  With tears and prayers, the twins toured the relics of the
camp, anxious now to remember something of their terrible childhood
past, the past they'd spent all their adult years trying to forget.

MIRIAM MOZEs: It was very terrible to go back.  I felt like I was going
to a funeral.

Auschwitz had been the last place I had seen my mother, my father, my
older sisters.

EVA MOZES: We walked to the spot where the twins' barracks had stood.

There was only the foundation left: We learned that the Poles had
destroyed it and used it for firewood.

But everything around the twins' barracks was just as I remembered
it.

There was the watch tower!  And here were the brick barracks that were
used to warehouse the dead-just the same as when I had left it, forty
years before.

MENASHE LORINCZI: I decided to go to the crematorium by myself I left
the group and walked inside.  I started to read the psalms of David.

I never cry-often, I have wanted to cry, but I could not.  But there,
in the crematorium, I found myself crying.  I prayed, and then I
cried.

MIRIAM MOZES: When someone dies in the Jewish religion, it is very
important to bury them quickly.  You are then expected to "sit
shivah"-to mourn them.

But the mourning period is strictly limited.

All these years, I never buried my parents.  There was never any
funeral.  I never did anything in their memory, not even to say a
memorial prayer.

Instead, for years, I kept on mourning their loss.

Oddly enough, I felt strangely free at Auschwitz.  At last, I had found
my mother's resting place.  I could speak to my mother there.  It was
the only place in the world I felt close to her.  Our liberation had
happened in 1945, but I felt personally liberated for the first time in
1985.  I felt I could stop looking for my mother.  I knew I had found
her resting place.

Finally, the twins retraced the Death March in which thousands of
prisoners had trudged through the snow, just days before Soviet troops
arrived.  And as they marched, Mengele's children began to sing-loud,
boisterous Hebrew songs.

EVA MorES: One of the reporters asked me,

"Why are you singing?"  I told him that I felt strangely upbeat.  I had
never walked through these grounds as a free human being.  Forty years
before, I had been a skinny kid, halfdead, an orphan.  Then, we could
have died like flies, and it wouldn't have mattered.  Now here I was,
surrounded by the world press.

Since the Holocaust, I had always felt that if only the world knew our
story, it would care.  At Auschwitz, surrounded by all those reporters,
I felt, People do care.

The whole time I was at Auschwitz, I had this wonderful feeling my
mother was there also, listening to me, watching over me.  If I could,
I would go back to Auschwitz every year.

After Auschwitz, the twins returned to Israel and held a mock trial of
Dr.  Mengele at Yad Vashem, Israel's monument to the six million Jewish
Holocaust victims.  Nearly thirty twins and dwarfs testified before a
sIx-man tribunal of world dignitaries.  General Telford Taylor, whose
team of Nuremberg prosecutors had let Mengele slip away, who had
dismissed Mengele as dead, was on hand for the trial.  And so was
Gideon Hausner, who had successfully prosecuted Adolf Eichmann.

Simon Wiesenthal, who had kept the memory of Mengele and so many other
war criminals alive when the world would rather have forgotten,
occupied a place of honor on the podium.

Shyly, one by one, Mengele's twins stepped up and, under the glare of
the TV lights and cameras, told the world of their ordeal.

Moshe Offer addressed the tribunal from behind a curtain.  In a halting
voice, he spoke of his brother Tibi's ordeal under Dr.  Mengele, the
successive surgeries he had undergone, culminating in his barbaric
castration and death.  Zyl Spiegel, who had been known only as Twins'
Father, recounted his efforts to care for and protect the boy twins
even as he feared Mengele's wrath.  When Spiegel's presentation was
over, all the boys who had been under his ministering rose to greet
their Twins' Father.  A former nurse at Auschwitz recalled watching
Mengele "sew" two twins together in an effort to make them Siamese.  A
pair of female dwarfs-also twin swept as they remembered being forced
to perform naked in front of Mengele; before the war, they had been
circus performers.  How delighted Mengele had seemed when they were
first brought to him!  He had chuckled,

"Now, I have work for twenty years.

In the audience, dozens of twins from Israel, the United States, and
around the world listened to the testimonies silently, intently, often
tearfully, As for the Mengele family in Germany, if they followed the
"trial" of the man they had successfully shielded all his life, they
said not a word.  Was Rolf Mengele shocked by Moshe Offer's story of
Mengele's slaughter of his twin brother?  Did Karl Heinz, in his office
at the Mengele farm-equipment factory in Gunzburg, wince at the
accounts of his stepfather's mutilations and grotesque experiments?

Did Dieter Mengele feel any shame?  Did Irene?  Did Martha?  No
available evidence suggests that they did.  Indeed, none of the
Mengeles, not his son, not his nephews, not his wives, have ever
expressed any remorse or any wish to atone for the massive suffering
inflicted by their notorious relative.  Even Rolf, the most public of
the Mengeles and supposedly the most contrite, has been ambiguous and
contradictory in his statements.

At the close of the historic three-day proceedings, the tribunal put
out a statement Saying,

"There exists a body of evidence justifying the committal for trial of
the SS Haupsturmfuhrer Josef Mengele for war crimes and crimes against
humanity."  What Taylor and others had been unable to do at Nuremberg,
they were attempting to do now.

CANDLES' pilgrimage to Auschwitz and trial of Mengele galvanized the
moribund forty-year hunt for the war criminal.  Until 1984, no
government had cared enough about Mengele to launch a sustained effort
to find him.  But now, inspired by the twins' stories of life in the
Mengele barracks, governments and individual Nazi-hunters competed to
find him.  Large rewards were proffered for his capture.  The West
German government, which had done little to pursue Mengele since the
1964 Frankfurt trials, now offered $300,000 for any clues that might
lead to him.  In California, the Simon Wiesenthal Center posted a
reward of $1 million, while in Washington the Washington Times
newspaper promised another million dollars.  In May, the Israeli
government also put up $1 million.  By the Spring of 1985, there was a
price of nearly $4 million on Mengele's head.

Enticed by the promise of millions, fortune-hunters took off for the
jungles of South America to search for Mengele.  Camera crews and
squads of television correspondents became a commonplace sight in the
most remote parts of Paraguay and Brazil.

The West German and Israeli governments-traditionally distrustful of
each other-gingerly began to cooperate to find Mengele.

As neither wanted to share their intelligence with the other, the
United States was forced to act as an intermediary.  Yet, when
officials from the U.S. Department of Justice actually examined the
"intelligence" available in the files of the Germans and Israelis, as
well as whatever material the CIA possessed, they found it amounted to
very little.

There had not been a single reliable sighting of Mengele in over twenty
years.  There was no recent photograph known for certain to be of
him.

Although he was said to be in or around Paraguay, the experts who
gathered to discuss the case agreed he could be anywhere.  Four decades
of sporadic hunts by various individuals had resulted in only a stream
of rumors and dead ends.  He had become a mythical creature.  Fantastic
tales-and few facts-about Dr.  Mengele abounded.

The Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (051), which
was conducting the search for the U.S. government, found itself deluged
with an inordinate number of bizarre leads.  Mengele was spotted in Las
Vegas, in Westchester, and even playing in a marimba band in
California.  At one point, investigators were again directed to Miami
Beach, to the Fontainebleau Hotel, where a clerk swore a man by the
name of Mengele had checked in.  When 051 officials arrived at the
elegant resort, extremely popular with observant Jews, they found a Mr.
Mengele was indeed registered.  They hurried up to his room, banged on
the door, and were greeted by Dieter Mengele-Lolo's flustered son.

The driving force behind the Justice Department's inquiry was the
memory of the Klaus Barbie investigation, which found that the United
States had long been secretly involved with the infamous Butcher of
Lyons.  Because Mengele had remained at large for so many years and had
never been tried, there was a suspicion the United States had helped
him, too.  But files at the National Archives-which had contained the
damning evidence linking Barbie to American intelligence-were sketchy
when it came to Mengele.  The most intriguing document suggested that
Mengele had been interrogated at a prisoner-of-war camp (something He
alluded to in the autobiographical novel), then let go.  But there was
nothing to suggest an active involvement between the Auschwitz doctor
and the American postwar government.

Because of the scarcity of solid clues, the German, U.S. and Israeli
team of investigators decided the surest way to find Mengele would be
through his family.  For years, Hans Sedlmeier, the trusted Mengele
family assistant, had been suspected of maintaining links with the war
criminal.  Sedlmeier, who was now living quietly in Gunzburg, had
openly admitted helping Mengele years earlier in an interview with
American journalist Flora Rheta Schreiber published by The New York
Times syndicate in the early 1970s.  At the time, Sedlmeier's admission
went unnoticed; no one seemed to care.

A surprise search by German authorities of Sedlmeier's house in the
spring of 1985 uncovered dozens of letters ostensibly from Mengele.

Unbeknown to Sedlmeier, his wife had kept Copies of letters from the
war criminal over the years.  Searchers also found a notebook with the
names and Brazilian addresses of both the Bosserts and the Stammers.

Orders were immediately given to find and interview them.  In the
course of an interrogation, Liselotte Bossert quickly volunteered that
Mengele was dead, and directed searchers to his gravesite.

In June 1985, an international team of forensic experts gathered around
the unkempt gravesite in Embu, Brazil, marking the remains of Wolfgang
Gerhard.  As hundreds of reporters and cameramen watched intently, the
experts broke open the casket lid to reveal a grisly heap of bones.

The scientists pulled out a pile of bones, some teeth, a few clumps of
hair, and a pair of faded, rotting trousers.  The scientists basked in
the unprecedented media spotlight.  Pressed to come up with instant
answers to satisfy the curiosity of the journalists around them, they
made rapid determinations based on superficial examinations and
incomplete data.  The scientists competed with each other for the
attention of the television cameras.  Within three days, they had
declared with "scientific certainty" the remains were those of the
Angel of Death, Dr.  Josef Mengele.

Soon after, Wolfgang and Liselotte Bossert and Gitta Stammer emerged for
the first time to talk to the press about their years aiding the
Auschwitz doctor.  The Bosserts showed several photographs they had
kept of the war criminal, and even held up his beloved Burberry
raincoat.  Former neighbors of Mengele in Sao Paulo also surfaced to
talk almost fondly about the private, elegant old man who kept to
himself as he took long walks through the dilapidated neighborhood.

Draping herself in the soft white shawl Mengele had given her years
before, Elsa Gulpian wistfully recalled her years with the Auschwitz
doctor.  Elsa told story after story about the gentle old man she had
fallen in love with years before, and who had refused to marry her.

Meanwhile, Rolf Mengele also came forward to publicly assert that his
father had indeed died in 1979.  Rolf released a wealth of papers,
diaries, notebooks, and photographs to the German magazine Bunte for
publication.  There are suspicions that Mengele's son sought to profit
from the publicity surrounding his father's death.  It has been claimed
that he became involved in a book deal, and he even sought a Hollywood
contract to make a movie about his father.

The U.S. team of forensic pathologists was summoned to testify before
Congress about the Embu skeleton.  The scientists insisted the bones
were indeed Mengele's.  Under oath, they swore there were no
inconsistencies between the skeletal remains found in Embu and what was
known about Mengele from his military and medical records.  But an
attorney at the World Jewish Congress, now the 051, raised questions
about the doctors' findings.  All of them knew, after all, about
Mengele's teenage bout with osteomylitis, which appeared in his war
records.  The virulent bone disease ought to have turned up on the
skeleton, and the scientists' inability to find even a trace of the
osteomylitis certainly represented an "inconsistency," one, moreover,
the forensic scientists ought to have revealed to Congress.

As, one by one, Nazi-hunters like Wiesenthal and Serge and Beale
Klarsfeld declared themselves satisfied with the findings, the German,
American, and Israeli governments also called off their hunts.  In
Washington, then-attorney general Edwin Meese announced that the U.S.
search for Dr.  Mengele was over.

Behind the scenes, however, investigators of all three governments were
at first reluctant to close their Mengele files.  The Mengele family
had pledged to turn over medical records and X rays that could help
identify the skeleton in Embu, but never did so.  Nor was Germany able
to turn up any X rays from Mengele's youth that would have enabled
scientists to show conclusively the remains were those of the Auschwitz
doctor.  In Washington, Frankfurt, and Jerusalem, experts continued to
ponder the troubling question of the osteomylitis.  Forensic scientists
were asked again and again to reexamine the skeleton for signs of the
disease, which, by all accounts, should have left marks, even years
later.

Anxious to settle the question once and for all, in 1986, the Justice
Department even hired an expert from the Smithsonian Institute to fly
to Brazil and reexamine the skeleton for traces of the osteomylitis.

But he, too, could not find definite proof of the illness.

With the exception of the dental forensic scientist, members of the
U.S. team of experts never did submit a final report on their findings,
a comprehensive study that would have laid to rest any lingering
questions about the authenticity of the skeleton.  Despite their rush
to proclaim in front of TV cameras that the Embu skeleton was Mengele,
the pathologists evidently would not put their findings on paper.  Only
with the discovery, nearly a year later, of dental X rays in Brazil
believed to be Mengele's, did one team member, forensic odontologist
Dr.  Lowell Levine, submit his own report to the Justice Department.

It was never made public because the case was never closed.

Meanwhile, a fickle public and press quickly forgot that no final
report was ever issued on the Mengele investigation.  Despite the vast
amounts of money, time, and staffing devoted to the hunt, it was never
possible to review the body of information the Justice Department had
gathered.  Although privately, officials confidently insisted that
Mengele was dead, they did not say so publicly.  One problem hampering
U.S. officials was an agreement made at the start of the 1985 hunt
between Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, and Washington: that all three governments
would publicize their Mengele reports at the same time.  But in Israel,
one man was reluctant to officially close the case, and because of his
adamance, he succeeded in preventing Germany and the United States from
doing so.

After the discovery of the bones, veteran Nazi-hunter Menachem Russek
had quietly undertaken an investigation of his own.  A colonel in the
Israeli police-and an Auschwitz survivor-Russek was profoundly
disturbed by the speed with which other countries wanted to close their
Mengele files.  Russek flew to Brazil and Germany to interview
individuals connected with the case.  Russek also spent months going
over the various diaries and notebooks said to have belonged to
Mengele.  Russek concluded the body was part of an elaborate hoax
designed to throw the Western world off the scent.

He prepared a scathing forty-page report, in which he wrote that "it is
not yet time to 'bury' the Angel of Death, Dr.  Josef Mengele."  Russek
thought the six-year-old "death by drowning" story on a Brazilian beach
much too tidy.  Although other top officials in the Israeli government
believed the skeleton in Embu was that of Mengele, Russek kept
stubbornly insisting the case should remain open.

This veteran of Nazi hunts was mocked behind the scenes as an old
sentimentalist who could not bring himself to admit Mengele was dead.

The Israeli government would not even allow him to release his
report.

He was later edged out of his job, and pressured into retirement.

Mengele's twins do not for a moment believe their nemesis has died.

They are sure the Auschwitz doctor has succeeded in tricking the world
yet another time.  Bewildered and betrayed, they cannot understand why
the hunt for him has been abandoned.

Mengele, who was an enigma in his youth, a riddle at Auschwitz, and
elusive in his life after the war, remains a mystery even after his
supposed death.

MOSHE OFFER: Dr.  Mengele was a very shrewd, a very clever man.  I
have a feeling he will never be caught.  A man who gives children
sweets, then terrible injections-do you really believe such a man would
let himself be caught?

In 1987, the German government awarded the Auschwitz twins thousands of
dollars each in restitution-a small, belated attempt to make up for the
pain they had endured, an effort to erase the past.

Of course, none of Mengele's children will ever be able to forget what
happened.  Images of the Auschwitz death doctor are still as vivid and
terrifying as decades earlier.  But thanks to Germany's action, as well
as the attention afforded to their plight during the mock trial and
manhunt, a few of them have begun to find it in their hearts to
forgive.

With forgiveness comes a faint sense of optimism, a glimmer of the
inner peace that has eluded Mengele's twins for so long.

VERA GROSSMAN: In the spring of 1987, I was invited by a German pastor
of a church in Frankfurt to come and give a lecture.  I was to go as a
representative of the Mengele twins, and speak about "building bridges"
between Israel and Germany, between the victims and the perpetrators.

I agreed, excited about the opportunity of speaking to Germans about my
experiences in the Holocaust.

At the church, I found I was one of a panel of speakers-nearly all of
them Germans.  I gave my talk in English, and was praised and
applauded.

Afterwards, I went to a reception in my honor in the church hall.

As I stood greeting people, I saw two middle-aged women come up to
me.

Very politely, they asked me if I was

"Fraulein Grossman."  I said yes.

It was then that they told me they were the daughters of Professor
Otmar von Verschuer.

I felt faint-I felt my legs go under.  I started praying that I would
not collapse-I prayed to my Jewish God inside this church that I would
keep my composure.

We began to talk.  We went to sit on a bench in the church.  They
wanted to know what their father had done.  I told them what I knew:
that Verschuer had been both Mengele's superior and his mentor.  We
spoke for nearly two hours.

Then they told me their story.  They told me they were little girls
-ten and twelve years old-when Mengele would come to their house to
visit their father.  They remembered how the two would talk for hours
about music and science.

Mengele often brought candy and toys for them.  They loved him!

They even called him

"Uncle Mengele."

Then they began to cry.  They said they were sorry for what their
father had done.  They asked me to forgive them.

I told them they had no need to ask my forgiveness.  I told them I
understood-we had all been little girls in the face of the horror, none
of us had known what was going on.

But Verschuer's daughters kept on crying.  They cried and cried.

They could not stop crying.

Afterword.

The Roll Call.

On January 27, 1945, the Russian Army marched into Auschwitz.

The liberators entered a cold and forlorn barracks, and there they
found approximately 160 of Mengele's twins crouched within.  Later,
they discovered that another thirty or forty additional twins had also
managed to survive.  Still later, Israeli and Polish scholars learned
that a total of three thousand twins had passed through Mengele's
experimental laboratories.  Their survival rate had been less than 10
percent.

Liberation had come in the wintry Chill of Polish soil, but the one
simple, terrible historical fact was that more than twenty-eight
hundred of the twins would not be coming back.

Today, the surviving twins are spread out across four continents and at
least ten countries.  These wounded adults have never quite stopped
thinking of themselves as Mengele's child guinea pigs.  And while their
spiritual bond is deathless and infinite, they have scattered into the
four winds.  Today, they can be found everywhere from Brooklyn, New
York, to Sydney, Australia; from Skokie, Illinois, to Zurich,
Switzerland; from Jerusalem to Budapest; from Tel Aviv to Brussels.

But wherever they are, wherever they go, the Children of the Flames
will always awaken to the noise of Mengele's footsteps, to the sounds
of the Auschwitz Roll Call: Z,II T1I3 SAILOR Zyl Klein is Still
sailing, though much closer to home.  The most restless of Mengele's
twins now works for a local shipping company in his hometown of Ashdod,
Israel His exotic voyages to distant lands have ended, but he still
manages to be away at sea three or four days a week.  The strapping
Zyl, who is sixty years old, insists he has the stamina of far younger
sailors.  He lives with his wife, who has a son from her first marriage
whom Zyl helped raise and loves as his own.  The vagabond of yesteryear
is now a grandfather of four.  His only sadness comes from his
continued estrangement from his twin brother.

THE STERN SISTERS At sixty Hedvah and Leah are still inseparable.

Neither has lost the optimism and sense of humor that enabled them to
overcome Auschwitz.  During the war, the Stern sisters were always
delighted when the Red Cross trucks that transported them to Mengele's
laboratory could not come, and they were made to walk through the
camp.

Even though a stroll through Auschwitz could hardly be scenic or
enjoyable, the twins were happy for the exercise and glad to be
outdoors.

And today, the sisters who loved fresh air, even Auschwitz air, are
living out their lives on the Moshav, the communal farm they helped
found in Ashdod.  Both continue to work in the fields.  Both are
married, both have several children and grandchildren, and both are
hoping, any day now, to become great-grandmothers.  Occasionally, they
pause and think wistfully back to their days growing up in Eastern
Europe, when, together with the mother they adored and lost, they had
hoped to open up a seamstress shop-The Stern Sisters.

MOSHE OREER Moshe has a high-level job as a technician for Israeli
television.  But the images he sometimes glimpses in the course of his
work have nothing to do with daily program fare.  In the middle of the
most innocuous daytime soap opera,

"Miki" sees his twin brother, Tibi, pale and sickly and entreating, the
way he looked after returning from a session in Mengele's laboratory.
The images on the screen become mangled and confused.

Other days, during a news show, perhaps, or the screening of an old
movie, Offer is transported back to his parents' estate in
Transylvania, in those joyful years before the war, when he and Tibi
were spoiled and lavished with gifts.  He sees Tibi smiling and
laughing in the horse-drawn carriage reserved just for the twins.

Together, he and Tibi secretly take sips of the sweet, syrupy liqueur
their father manufactures.  The flickering images on the screen become
clear again.

At fifry-eight, the little boy who survived the loss of his parents,
brothers, sisters, and finally of his twin, and who endured several
nervous breakdowns, has rebuilt his life.  Although he dearly loves his
Iraqi-born wife and their many pretty dark-eyed daughters, the pride
and joy of his life is his lone son Shai, who reminds him of Tibi.

TIV1NS' FATHER The oldest of Mengele's twins, Zyl Spiegel is
seventy-five now.  The man who led an army of twins out of Auschwitz
has slowed down.  He retired several years ago from his job as an
accountant and spends much of his time in his Tel Aviv home, enjoying
the company of his wife, his two children, and five grandchildren.

Occasionally, he will get calls or letters from his other children-the
twins.  That's when he'll drop everything and become Zwilingefater once
more, listening to them with a sympathetic ear and attending to their
every need.

MAGDA SPIEGEL Zyl's sister lives in Haifa with her husband, Nahman.

Magda, whose six-year-old boy was sent to the crematorium by Mengele,
is a mother of two and a grandmother of four.  She is especially proud
of her son, who became a doctor and has received many honors for his
scientific research.

But when Magda is alone in her Haifa apartment, she furtively pulls out
the old photographs of the blond, angelic little boy she lost.

And then she remembers the masses of tired Jews trudging down the
selection line.  And she relives that fateful moment when the handsome
Dr.  Mengele stepped up to ask her the question that both saved and
damned her: Was she a twin?  For not a day passes that Magda, guilt
ridden and inconsolable, does not think of her dead son.

EVA AND M MOZES Eva Mores, now Eva Kor, lives in Terre Haute, Indiana,
where she is a successful real estate agent.  She is married to a
pharmacist and has two children, a boy and a girl.  Eva runs CANDLES'
worldwide headquarters from a cramped spare room in her Indiana home.

Her sister, Miriam, resides with her husband in a small house in
picturesque Ashkelon, an ancient seaside resort in Israel where the
biblical Golden Calf was recently unearthed by archaeologists.  Miriam
has three daughters and five grandchildren.

Though she has been quite ill of late, Miriam continues to work as a
nurse in a nearby hospital.  Because of her calm manner and cool
professionalism, she has been promoted to head nurse, in charge of the
heart-and-lung clinic.

But Miriam, who was diagnosed as having a rare form of cancer, needed
some nursing care of her own recently.  Who best to call on but Eva,
who promptly flew in from Indiana to take care of her twin.

And when the doctors declared that Miriam could only be saved if she
received a new kidney, Eva unhesitatingly volunteered her own.

Dozens of Mengele's twins dropped by to visit them before the
surgery.

The Mores sisters, alive and well with one kidney each, just turned
fifty-five.

JUDITH YAGUDAIl After years of financial struggle, Judith is the only
one among Mengele's twins believed to be a millionaire.  She lives with
her husband in a splendid mansion in Tel Aviv's most elegant suburb of
Savyon.  She is still very close to her mother.  Although the two don't
live in the same house anymore, they get together often and reminisce
about Ruthie, and life before the war.  Her mother no longer complains
about Judith's choice of a husband.  Judith recently turned
fifty-six.

PETER SOMOGYL Peter lives in Pleasantville, New York, in affluent
Westchester County, where he has opened a successful appliance
business.  He and his wife have two children, a boy and a girl.  He is
fifty seven years old.

LEA AND MENASHE RIN Lea Lorinezi, now Lea Cluck, runs two flourishing
ladies' garment stores in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

She and her husband are devoutly religious hassidic Jews, and live in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  They have two children and several
grandchildren.  Menashe, her twin, lives with his wife Yaffah in
Netanya, where they spend most of their time caring for their three
children and six grandchildren.  The Lorinczi twins are fifty-six years
old.

VERA GROSSMAN Vera is the gypsy among Mengele's children.  At
fifty-two, she can be found wandering around Europe, the United States,
and Israel.  A popular figure on the lecture circuit, she is also
devoted to her daughter, Irit, her son, and her three grandchildren.

And she makes frequent trips to Haifa to look after her twin, Olga.

O GROSSMAN Olga is slowly finding in middle age the peace of mind that
eluded her in her youth.  She has recovered sufficiently from her
depression to stop seeing Dr.  Stern and resume a normal life.  She is
still happily married to her army colonel, and together they live in a
sun-drenched apartment high on the hills of Haifa.  They have two
children.  Olga is excited about the prospect of becoming a
grandmother; she hopes it will be less painful than being a mother.

EVAKUPAS Eva is a housewife and mother, living in Tel Aviv.  She is
intensely private about her life, and discloses few personal details.

VERA BLAU Vera, fifty-six, has become an artist in Tel Aviv.  Vera's
art instructor is persuaded that his lively, sensitive student could
add a great deal to the existing body of art on the Holocaust.  He
urges her to paint scenes from the concentration camp.  But this
veteran of Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and Bergen-Belsen has no desire
to recapture the past: She looks to the present for subjects she can
paint.  Her canvasses are bright and colorful, depicting joyous scenes
of everyday life.  Her paintings are sunny and cheerful, and that is
perhaps not as improbable as it seems.  They were painted, after all,
by the grownup little girl who still believes, in spite of everything
she has seen and heard, that Dr.  Josef Mengele loved children.

DR.  JOSEF MENGELE In his life, the Auschwitz doctor wandered far
afield from his native Germany.  He journeyed to Poland, to Russia, to
Yugoslavia, to Austria, to Italy, to Argentina, to Switzerland, to
Paraguay, to Uruguay, and finally to Brazil.  His wanderings have not
ceased.  His alleged skeletal remains were at last returned to the
Fatherland in 1989.  But still the bones keep moving.  And in 1990,
forty-five years after the Liberation, the Allies finally got their
hands on the Angel of Death.  After a lifetime on the move, he has made
another voyage, this time to England.  The bones alleged to be his were
recently shipped across the Channel to the University of Leicester, for
forensic and pathological testing performed by yet another medical
expert.

Somehow, it is hard to imagine that the story will end there in the
British Isles.

As with everything else concerning Dr.  Mengele, the analysis is proving
difficult, the results, elusive.

the end.