Dr. Mengele's Twins

“Never,” they say in unison.

They said he was almost fatherly. “We knew he's not going to harm us. We knew it.”

“Because he was so handsome,” Pearl says. “You forgot about anything.”

“He was like an angel,” Helen adds.

“We were like friends with him,” Pearl says. “Really.”

“He was very smart,” Helen says. “People were falling in love with him; I'm not kidding.”

Their report is consistent with those of other twin survivors who said Mengele was their protector as much as their persecutor. The twins weren't treated any better than other prisoners in terms of being fed or clothed, but they were rarely outwardly harmed—in order to keep their bodies intact for comparisons—and they were allowed to keep their hair (so Mengele could measure and analyze it), which preserved a shred of humanity. Mengele prized the twins as case studies for investigating genetics; some say it was to understand how to engineer a master race with ideal traits; others say it was to devise a way to mass-produce twins to repopulate Germany. His laboratory had to be spotless, and his assistants were often Jewish prisoners.

Lifton writes that, by all accounts, Mengele was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure, who one minute was offering children sweets and a ride in his car, and the next minute driving those same kids to the crematorium. He was known to give a pat on the head but also to inject twins' eyeballs, cut off a twin's testicles, or kill one twin immediately after the other twin died, in order to contrast autopsies. “They wanted to compare if the insides were as identical as the outside,” Helen explains. Lifton describes how Mengele injected twins with chloroform to stop their hearts, and one incident when Mengele shot two of his “favorite” twin boys—eight years old—in the neck and autopsied them on the spot, in order to resolve a dispute with other doctors as to whether they carried tuberculosis. (They didn't.) In one infamous operation, Mengele is said to have sewed two Gypsy twins together to create conjoined twins.

Helen says she was “sick for years” after the war, but doctors were stymied as to the cause, and they kept sending her to psychiatrists. “They all think, if you're a survivor, there must be something wrong with your mind,” Helen says. “But I knew it was something drastically wrong with me. It wasn't my head.” Finally one doctor deduced that she had TB in the bladder. “He calls me up on a Monday morning; I'll always remember the day. He says, 'Helen, I finally know what's wrong with you and you're not crazy.' I started crying.”

After the sisters had spent a year in Auschwitz, in January 1945, it became clear that the Germans were losing the war. “The Russians were approaching and the Americans from the other side,” Helen recounts. “The Nazis evacuated the camps. They didn't want no evidence. But they left hundreds of people in beds who couldn't walk. Whoever was able to walk, they chased out. And we were in that death march that lasted from January to—when were we liberated?”

“May,” Pearl replies.

“April,” Helen corrects her.

“When they took us for the march,” Pearl goes on, “it was our birthday: January eighteenth.”

“I said to Pearl, 'We never will forget this day.'”

They marched in frigid temperatures. “There was no food, no water, nothing,” says Pearl, describing the march. “So wherever we were walking, the snow disappeared.”

“Because we ate up all the snow,” Helen explains. “We slept in sties and warehouses. No taking baths, no changing clothes. We were walking around like crazy people.”

Pearl says some of the German onlookers threw bread when their ragged convoy passed by. “When a prisoner ran toward the people that were throwing bread,” Helen says, “the SS shoot them right on the spot.”