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Dr. Mengele's Twins
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In an excerpt from her new book, One and the Same, Abigail Pogrebin talks to twin sisters who survived the Nazi doctor's monstrous experiments at Auschwitz.
"If not for her, I wouldn't be here."
Helen Rapaport declares this in a heavy Yiddish accent, looking over at her identical twin sister, Pearl Pufeles. The two eighty-six-year-olds are sitting side by side in a Chicago hospital lounge on a patterned sofa. Helen is wearing a green floor-length hospital gown and medical bracelet—unexpectedly, she was kept overnight for some cardiac tests, so our interview has to take place here. She is frustrated that we're not meeting in her home in Buffalo Grove, as planned. “I cooked all day yesterday,” she says ruefully.
“She made kugel,” offers Pearl, who is dressed in a purple ensemble—purple polyester pants, purple top with flower appliqué on the left shoulder—and cream-colored orthopedic sneakers.
Both twins fold their hands in front of them when they talk. They don't look nearly as identical now as they do in the black-and-white pictures from their youth; in those, they are indistinguishable, wearing identical outfits well into their twenties. What remains similar about them today is their thinning hair, their drooping eyelids—which give their faces a soft kindness that reminds me of my late grandma Esther—and the blue numbers tattooed on their arms: Helen is 5080; Pearl is 5079.
I thought I'd have to ease gingerly into their memories of Dr. Josef Mengele—the monstrous Nazi doctor who experimented on twins in Auschwitz. But they start talking about him right away.
One and the Same: My Life as an Identical Twin and What I've Learned About Everyone's Struggle to be Singular. By Abigail Pogrebin. 288 pages. Doubleday. $26.95.
“You've heard about him,” Pearl says. “He was the one who called out when we got off of the train.” She refers to the cattle car that transported prisoners to the camps. “He called out, 'Zwillinge austreten,' which means 'Twins, step out.' And we were pushed aside. I don't know, there were about seventy sets of twins.”
“More,” Helen corrects her. “More.”
In his 1986 book, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton describes how Mengele, who had a Ph.D. in genetics, “embodied the selections process” for many survivors, who remember him always at “the ramp” when the transports arrived. “...He frequently went to the ramp when not selecting in order to see that twins were being collected and saved for him,” Lifton writes. “Mengele could exploit the unique opportunity Auschwitz provided for quick and absolute availability of large numbers of these precious research subjects.”
“They took the twins to a different barracks,” Pearl continues. “And we didn't know what was waiting for us.”
“We didn't know first if we should tell him we were twins,” Helen recalls.
“We didn't know what they were going to do with us,” Pearl repeats.
“But we were so identical, they would have known anyway,” Helen explains. “So Pearl said, 'Let's just step out. Whatever will be with one will be with the other.' So that's how we wound up in the barracks with other twins.”
They had been herded, at the age of twenty-three, from their home in Czechoslovakia, along with their father, Isaac Herskovic—“a top tailor,” Pearl says—and a brother, Morris, an older sister, Miriam, and Miriam's husband and three children. (Their mother, Hannah, had died years earlier of a stroke, and their four other siblings were already in other parts of the world by the time the war began.)
The train journey was gruesome. “Terrible.” Helen shakes her head. “They piled us up; I don't know how many. There was no air, no water.”
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
My Twin and Me
Abigail Pogrebin is the author of Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. A Yale graduate, she has written for many national publications and has produced for Mike Wallace at 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, and Fred Friendly. She lives with her husband and two children in Manhattan—as does her identical twin, New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin.
Dear Lord, how could this be? I can't stop crying.
Thank you for this article.
me too
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.
but so handsome!
That was humbling to say the least
bless these two women who were witness to such horror and madness.
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.
What a fascinating story! I cannot wait to read this book.
Whoa. Thanks for the article.
You said it dbro0009.
Thank for you for sharing this story.
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.
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.
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.
Damn. It's so crazy that people can deny these events. This heartbreak.
God bless these two women.
I have no reason to complain about anything after reading this.
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.
Invaluable. My heart goes out to these incredible, brave women. And to this author.
Thank you.
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