DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES
Authors: CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES
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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 antiSemitic 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
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 antiSemitic 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
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