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Dr. Mengele's Twins
“That was Mengele who was doing the selections,” Pearl recalls. “He was waving his wand—whatever you call it. To the right, you still have a chance of living. To the left, all the elderly, the sick, the little ones, they all went to the left and those were taken straight with the towels.”
I ask Pearl to describe Mengele, and her eyes light up. “He was the most handsomest—”
“Like Clark Gable,” Helen interjects.
“He was tall and the most handsome guy,” Pearl continues. “He should have been an actor or something and not killed Jews. His boots-—they were so shiny that instead of a mirror, you could have used his boots.”
The boots clearly made an impression. “They were cleaned like three times a day,” Helen goes on. “And he changed always his uniforms. He was the most handsomest guy. I don't think Clark Gable was as handsome as he was.”
“No,” Pearl says definitively. “Walking around with a little—what is it called? Swagger?”
“Even the prisoners,” Helen says. “Some of them fell in love with him.”
The twins cleaned the warehouse for twelve days.
“Then Mengele needed us for his experiments,” Pearl says.
“Toward the end, you didn't know it was bodies anymore,” Helen says dully. “I said to Pearl, 'Pretend it's a sack of potatoes. Or a sack of onions.' To this day, if we go shopping and we want to pick out some oranges...” She pauses. “To this day, sometimes if I pick up an orange and I see it sliding, I'm right back in Auschwitz. Or potatoes or pumpkins. Anything that's on a pile. You can't help it.”
They keep focusing on the fact that at least they had each other. “We had to do the job,” Pearl says. “But we were together. We were always together.”
Did they talk to each other a lot while they worked?
“We were quiet,” Helen replies.
Their memories of the Nazi doctor are incredibly benign. “Mengele wasn't beating us or killing us,” Pearl says. “He was kind to us. And how could you hate him, when he was so handsome?”
He took their medical history and measured them meticulously. “We were sitting like Pearl and I are now, and he was in the middle,” Helen recounts. “We were always nude.”
“No clothes,” Pearl confirms.
“Because he measured us,” Helen explains.
“Every single thing,” Pearl adds.
“Even our hair was counted,” Helen marvels. “The eyelashes. He was measuring Pearl; then he came to me, and vice versa. Everything was written down.”
Mengele left the injections to his nurses. The sisters don't know what the needles contained, but they do remember blood being drawn constantly. “They were taking our blood every single day,” Pearl says, “and so Helen asked one of the nurses, 'How much blood can they take?' And she said, 'Endless. You have plenty blood.'”
“'You always make more,' ” Pearl recalls the nurse explaining.
“One nurse was taking blood from one way; the other was injecting us with monstrosities that we don't know.” Helen shakes her head. “To this day. And we never will find out, because all the records are gone.”
But Mengele himself was never cruel to them?
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neroves1
Dear Lord, how could this be? I can't stop crying.
lincolnspeaks
Thank you for this article.
nickels1
me too
mcmchugh99
Too bad he wasn't hanged right after the war instead of getting a long vacation in South America.
I don't know what else to say about Dr. Mengele. He was shit in shoes.
dana-zucchini
but so handsome!
dbro0009
That was humbling to say the least
statusquomustgo
bless these two women who were witness to such horror and madness.
lesherb
I imagine Mengele treated the twins somewhat like people treat lab animals. They don't inflict harm on them (outside of the harm they're doing with their experiments). How many times has a researcher killed a lab animal to do a necropsy for research purposes?
It's sickening to think that any human being could consider an entire race of people to be less than. Then do experiments on them supposedly for the betterment of his own particular race.
Thank you Ms. Pogrebin, for getting these lovely ladies's story before it was too late. We cannot allow this atrocity to go by without recording it as a warning to others.
mariaric
What a fascinating story! I cannot wait to read this book.
Mercy1981
Whoa. Thanks for the article.
laniesmom
You said it dbro0009.
Thank for you for sharing this story.
hdc77494
Good reading for revisionist historians that think the US was evil for developing the nuclear bomb. Sadly US public opinion kept us out of the European war until the Japanese attacked us. Atrocities were reported in the American papers as early as 1939, but the public didn't really care about jews, and certainly didn't see why American soldiers should die for some other country.
Namgrunt
I read this I felt like Iwas there,I hope history doesn't repeat itself again cause this is not taugh in the classroom. God bless the Jews.
Mixpixlix
Amazing and glorious recapturing of history many would choose to forget.
My mother's brothers and their families lie moldering in a grave in what was Czechslovakia. My father spent time in Buchenwald though his family managed to get him out prior to the start of the mass murders.
As the survivors run out of time to tell their stories, we must be grateful to these twins and others AND most especially writers like Ms. Progrebin who are willing to take on the tough tasks and preserve history for those who would deny and those who need to know.
dana-zucchini
Damn. It's so crazy that people can deny these events. This heartbreak.
mvtp47
God bless these two women.
I have no reason to complain about anything after reading this.
Froberg66
How do you reconcile the twins fond, semi-erotic recollections of Mengele with the lurid and ludicrous allegations against him? Waving a "wand", for example, or Mengle sewing "two Gypsy twins together to create conjoined twins." Why would anyone do that? It's a sick joke.
Stacking a giant pile of bodies prior to cremation (has this warehouse been located in Auschwitz photos?) simply out of a fetish for neatness? Why? As if a pair of young women could stack bodies all day.
The best part of all is Helen volunteering the fact multiple doctors she's seen have considered her crazy.
Also, according to both Primo Levi and Elie Weisel the "death march" the twins describe was a voluntary evacuation.
Thank you.
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