Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz by Lucette Matalon Lagnado & Sheila Cohn Dekel

Author:Lucette Matalon Lagnado & Sheila Cohn Dekel [Lagnado, Lucette Matalon & Dekel, Sheila Cohn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Physicians - Germany, Auschwitz (Concentration Camp), War Criminals - Germany, World War; 1939-1945 - Poland - Atrocities, Mengele; Josef, Auschwitz (Poland : Concentration Camp), World War; 1939-1945, Poland, Human Experimentation in Medicine, Holocaust; Jewish (1939-1945), Germany, War Criminals, Holocaust; Jewish (1939-1945) - Poland, Physicians, Twins, Atrocities, Military
ISBN: 9780140169317
Google: fsIypcIQiQgC
Amazon: 0140169318
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1991-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Isabel Ia

The pictures Mengele sent home to Gunzburg and to Rolf showed a dapper gentleman, no longer young, to be sure, but still handsome.

He was quite fit and trim. There was a jauntiness about him that neither time nor the ravages of the war and postwar years had quite managed to erase. The old sprezzatura was there, too, evident in the easy, relaxed way in which he posed alongside his shiny new car.

In 1954, Mengele’s father came to Buenos Aires to visit his son. The reunion was warm, and the elder Mengele gave Josef money to maIntain his lifestyle. Karl Sr. would eventually give his son a million marks to purchase half the shares of Fadro Farm, a pharmaceutical company.

The only bad news Karl brought was that Irene was insisting on a divorce; the couple had never obtained a legal separation, and now she wanted to marry Alfons Hackenjos, the staid but kindly Freiburg businessman she had met years earlier. Since the time for manhunts in Germany had long since ended, Mengele could no longer argue that the family needed to maintain the illusion that he was “dead.”

He had no choice but to agree to have the family lawyers back home prepare the divorce papers. The couple was divorced that year.

LEA LORINCZI: Even while I worked as a nurse, my family kept talking about shiddochim -matches-for me. They were always asking me if I wanted to get married. But I did not want to go out with the men they proposed for me.

I was looking for someone grownup, whom I could talk to, who would understand me. I needed a husband who would be a friend, a father, a mother. I did not like the boys my own age.

That’s how I became interested in my stepmother’s brother. He was much older than I was, but I felt I could talk to him. He asked my father for my hand, and I accepted.

Although he was still an exile, banished from his home and unable to resume his profession, his family’s concern and generosity helped make the 19 SOs decidedly good years for Dr. Mengele. But when Juan Peron was ousted in 1955, Nazis as well as Jews panicked: He had protected both. The military coup that threw the dictator out of office after more than twenty years of rule created havoc in the country. Sure enough, after Peron was gone, some of the Nazi publications, including Der Weg, were banned. Some war criminals felt concerned enough to flee to other countries. Egypt, where dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser had consolidated his hold, was the favorite refuge.

Despite the coup, Mengele felt secure enough to stay on in his adopted homeland. Even without the protection Peron had extended to Nazi fugitives, Mengele believed no one would come after him in Argentina; he had nothing to fear now.

His belief that he was safe at last was in many ways warranted. A decade had passed since the Nuremberg trials, and the hunt for Nazi war criminals had effectively ended, in Germany as in the rest of the world.

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