Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 14, 1991 TAG: 9104140068
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JON NORDHEIMER THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
She was 6 years old, and for years afterward she thought she would carry her awful secret to the grave. "To talk about it," she said last week, "is a descent into darkness."
Eva Kor of Terre Haute, Ind., could not bring herself to describe the scenes of horror to her children. "The pain was too great," she said.
Peter Somogyi, a New Jersey businessman, says he has put the nightmare behind him. But his wife says his cries of torment still awaken him in a cold sweat.
Nearly half a century after they entered the gates of Auschwitz, the Mengele twins are being heard as never before.
"Children of the Flames," a book by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel to be released Monday by William Morrow, describes the blighted histories of twins who have come forward in recent years.
Some, like Hizme, who lives in Oceanside, N.Y., are forcing themselves to speak in public for the first time.
Mengele selected about 1,500 sets of twins - Jews, gypsies and others - for projects conducted at his genetics laboratory. Many died in the research; at the end of the war, fewer than 200 individuals were alive.
In the experiments, many had blood drained and transfused in research that was said to be connected with Mengele's search for ways to increase the fertility and birth rates of German women. He also tried to find ways to change eye color.
Mengele worked on one twin and used the other for comparison.
Twenty-seven known survivors of the experiments live in the United States, most of them in the New York metropolitan area. Six are in Canada and about 100 in Israel and elsewhere.
Some survivors say they believe there are others still living who have allowed Mengele their past to remain locked in secrecy, too anguished by the experiments performed on them to speak out.
Some who were toddlers when Mengele and his staff subjected them to radical tests and surgical procedures might have concentration camp tattoos and unexplained scars, but no conscious memory of the ordeal.
Little of the research exists. It is thought that, after the war, Mengele either destroyed his records and tissue samples or carried them into hiding, first in Europe and then in South America.
In more than 40 years, Mengele's death has been reported many times. In 1985, his son and some experts identified the remains of a man who drowned near Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1979 as his.
"On the surface we enjoy normal lives, but we have never escaped the long, dark shadow of Mengele," said Hizme, a 53-year-old mother of two.
Hizme was speaking of her memories before a hushed audience at Congregation Ohab Zedek in Manhattan at an observance of Holocaust Memorial Week last Wednesday.
The memory that never ages haunts the survivors even as they grow old. In recent interviews, they said they carried a burden that other survivors of the camps do not: that their selection for Mengele's experiments spared their lives.
Their families died at Auschwitz. So did children who were not selected for the research.
"If childhood is the foundation of a human being's life," said Kor, who was 9 in 1944, when she arrived at Auschwitz, "then what kind of foundation can we have if our memories are filled with the smell of burning flesh and chimneys belching the black smoke of our families?"
There was one other difference, and for the twins it is the hardest to explain.
Mengele, known as the "Angel of Death" for his role in choosing who would live and who would die, was also, for them, Mengele the protector.
As long as he required them for his research, they were spared the gas chamber.
Giving blood samples and submitting to X-rays and injections were daily options to death, even though most of the twins would eventually die painful deaths, as did those who entered the crematorium on their first day in Auschwitz.
Given special status, the twins lived in their own barracks, separated by sex. They got an extra ration of food once or twice a week and were given the medical care denied to tens of thousands of others.
"Savior and demon," was the way Hizme described the dichotomy about Mengele in young minds. Even today survivors describe him as kindly and avuncular. They say he gave them candy and kissed them.
After Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet soldiers on Jan. 27, 1945, Eva Kor and her twin, Miriam, returned to their home in Transylvania, only to learn that 117 relatives had perished in the war.
Hizme was reunited with her twin brother, Rene, in the United States in 1950.
Rene Slotkin, Hizme's twin, was sitting in the rear of Temple Ohab Zedek while his sister spoke. He winced at each word. Hizme has multiple sclerosis and is in a wheelchair.
"When I look at Irene," Slotkin said, "I can't help but think of the experiments. Mengele experimented on one twin and kept the other for a control. . . . Irene got the injections. There's no records of what they put into her young body."
by CNB