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He say nothing to worry about, a simple division: those who can work and those who cannot. Necessary for the bureaucrats, that is all.

He rolls eyes.
Bureaucrats,
he say, and we laugh, he is with us against bureaucrats, everyone hate the bureaucrat.

His finger go left, right, left, right. He shout that families to find unity again after administration finished.

His hand soft, his decision quick; he is like conductor of orchestra.

Group on the left go to gas chamber.

In one hour, they are dead, mothers with their children. No mother will work if child is dead. Some children scream, they know what will happen. Adults believe in reason, they not see what comes.

The Angel squat down, his face at level with yelling child, and he say with voice of honey that there nothing to worry about. To make them feel better, he make a little game called “on the way to the chimney”—that is chimney there, that b-i-i-i-i-g tall one, to make warm all people working in that building. He can play game with the child. The child like that?

Of course, the child like that.

Group on right go to work, and to every horror in Auschwitz. They bleed from thousand sore. Hunger makes belly into strange shapes. Eye bad, making moans and screams like mad people. Even lice in camp leave them alone at end, because nothing left in their bodies for food for lice. Most dead in four month.

Often, I think that better, to be in first group.

The Angel knows. He makes choice like directing waltz, and he makes them sober. Other doctors in camp, Koenig and Rohde, make to be drunk before. Angel never drunk.

His name was Josef Mengele.

His name was Josef Mengele, and he was God. We discover that very fast.

An old Jewish prayer tells story of the flock which pass beneath the rod of the shepherd, the Lord, who decides who will live and who will not. On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Mengele make a board at certain height above ground, and make us all walk below it. You must reach board with head to live. People put stones in shoe or stand on tiptoes to succeed.

What is the point to this? There is no point. That is the point.

Mengele takes pleasure in power of life and death; he wants to control everything, every person, every behavior.

Always with him is aura of dreadful, dreadful menace. I cannot tell you what it was like, not in proper terms. Be happy you never experience it. Never do I feel such thing before; if ever it come to me again, I think I die of fright, simple as that.

Mengele’s charm is real, but also it is only half of him. He is friendly man on the outside; but on inside he is vicious, and it explodes for no reason, without warning.

He make rabbis dance, and then he send them to gas chamber.

He rip gold teeth from corpses and send them to his family home in Günzburg.

He hit a man over the head with an iron bar until eye and ear disappear under blood, and head is simply red ball on body.

He throws youngest baby onto stove, other baby onto pile of corpses, because no one tell him that their mothers are pregnant.

He shoots people for stopping on street without permission.

He has whole kindergarten, three hundred children, burnt alive in open fire. Children try to escape, and he hit them with sticks until they die.

One time, he find us cooking stolen potatoes, and he fly into huge rage. “Yes,” he shouts, “yes; this is how I imagine a Jewish hospital. You dirty whores, you unspeakable Jewish swine.”

And then someone shows him a jar with a fetus in one piece—this is very rare—and he calms down instantly, all smiles and appreciation.

Oh, we discuss his psychology; everywhere were rumors about Mengele, and you know Jews: we’ll gossip as long as we’ve got tongues in our mouths.

Mengele’s mother, Walburga, was huge woman, one moment warm and maternal, next moment a raging bull. Josef—Beppo, she call him—was her favorite son; the only one who can get her to smile.

In return, he very loyal to her, always takes her side.

His father, Karl, was at the family factory all the time; the Mengeles were the biggest employers in Günzburg. Karl wanted Josef to follow him into the business, but Josef had aims for higher things.

A mother who wanted that he be austere and chaste when he likes luxury and to indulge, and a father whose place he must take through achieving more.

No wonder that Josef becomes the Janus Man; one moment affectionate, the next cruel. Maybe he is man of two part, one made at Auschwitz, the other in place long before. The Auschwitz self let him operate in extermination camp; the other let him keep pieces of decency.

You see, Herbert, my thinkings toward him are also split.

Yes, I hate him, for everything he did. He sent my mother to the gas chamber on our first day there. He make it that my father works to death.

As for me and Esther, well, you see soon enough.

But also I remember his kindnesses, and I know, too, that without him I would be dead now.

Because Esther and I were twin, and twins were privileged in Auschwitz—a stupid word to use, “privilege,” in there, but it feels like that.

Mengele is interested—no, to call spade a spade, he is obsessed—with twins. In his evil heart, he has soft spot, small core of good, especially for twins.

And so they keep us apart and away, separate from all the shit.

We get best food—
chocolates, white bread, milk with lukchen,
mixture like macaroni—
in camp this is very special.

For us the smartest clothes; white pantaloons for boys, silk dresses for girls.

Also, and the best, we keep our own hair, so at least we look human.

We don’t have to be at roll call.

They slap our wrists for offenses which usually have death penalty.

They let us play under skies which crematorium flames make red like blood.

We are chosen ones, darlings always spoiled, and all because of Mengele. For his being two—angel and monster
,
gentle doctor and the sadistic killer—no better symbol than twin.

They put us in Barrack 14 of camp F in Birkenau, sister camp to Auschwitz. All kinds of twin there, like the Ark: big Hungarian soccer players, old Austrian gentlemen, gypsy dwarves. Mengele himself tattoos us with numbers, all beginning with letters “ZW” for zwillinge: twins.

“You’re a little girl,” he said. “You will grow, and some day you say that Dr. Josef Mengele himself give you your number. You’ll be famous. But important not to scratch it. Do this for your Uncle Pepi, no? Be more brave than Uncle Pepi, you know? Here is secret. They want to make number mark for Uncle Pepi, under his armpit, but he refused.”

Hygiene in the twins’ barrack was perfect; Mengele insisted that no infection is allowed.

Infection. You begin to see where this goes, yes?

We were like horses, a stud farm for him.

He wants twins because he thinks we give to him the secrets of life, show the parts of humanity nature is controlling, and also the parts which are from environment. If we share things, he think them from the gene; when things differ, must be from environment and experience.

They put us in baths and clean us. Then they take us to the laboratory on trucks with red cross; must be stolen, maybe just fakes.

Laboratory is smart, no different to laboratory you find in a large German city; marble tables with channels on sides for the drainage, porcelain sinks against the wall, rooms with armchairs, microscopes, and bookshelves, all the latest scientific publications.

First he weighs us, then he measures and compares, every part of our bodies—every part.

Esther and I always sit together, always nude.

We sit for hours together, and they measure her, and then me, and then me again and then her: how wide our ears and nose and mouth, the structure of our bones. Everything in detail, they want to know.

They talk of Jewish-Bolshevik commissars and subhumans, prototypes, repulsive, characteristic; all hard to understand, all sounding bad.

We are scared, of course, but never at the same time. When I shake, Esther holds me until I stop, or she cries while I hold her hand. We know that one of us has to remain strong at all times. The moment we give in together, we never recover.

We forget our differences the moment we arrive in Auschwitz. Every day, we are closer than ever, because we have to. It is that, or death.

Now the endless probes: needles to take fluids from our backs, immersion in steel vats full with cold water, pulleys holding us head to floor to measure speed of blood draining from our stomachs.

Awful, no?

I tell you, you compare to the others, and Esther and I are the lucky ones.

Mengele injects twins with typhus and tuberculosis.

He sterilizes women; he castrates men.

When twins are brother and sister, he makes them have sex with each other.

He takes a girl, seven year old, and tries to connect her urine tract to her colon.

He sews two gypsy twins back to back. He wants to connect their blood vessels with their organs. For three days, the twins scream and cry, all the time. Then they die of gangrene.

I know all these medical terms in English, because every day I think of them.

Then Mengele decides that
in vivo
tests are no good. Results much better from corpse than from living person. In normal life, twins die at same time not often; now, he can kill them at once, and make dissections to see results.

He takes needles and fills them with Evipal or chloroform. Five cubic centimeter of Evipal into the right arm, the victim sleeps, then ten cubic centimeter into the left ventricle of the heart, and instant death. Perhaps a little humane.

But sometimes, when not much stocks, maybe a day when he wants to be sadist, he fills the needles with petrol instead.

These experiments don’t work, of course. He tries to take from twins secrets we just don’t have, it’s insane.

Always he tells us that it’s a sin, a crime, not to use the possibilities which Auschwitz has for twin research, as never will another chance come along like this.

Maybe he looks for the secret of multiple birth so he can help repopulate the German nation. Perhaps he thinks he creates a new super-race, like breeding horses. After us, maybe the Poles; then maybe someone else.

And all so, so ironic, you know? Two ironies, both vile.

First, Mengele is fixated on purity of race, but this not something applying to he himself. Somewhere among his ancestors is doubt about paternity, and so he has no place in the Sippenbuch, the Kinship Book, for those who can prove that their families are pure Aryan for at least two hundred year. Himmler sent silver spoons to every family which has borne a “pure” child. For Mengele, no spoon; not for his own birth, not for his son.

Secondly, I don’t know if the experiments on twins have scientific meaning, but if there is, Mengele is not the man to find it. He is no genius. Dedicated and fanatic, yes, but at heart an assistant, not a leader. An efficient assistant. For him, he takes theories of genetics and race like he puts on
white gloves and hat. He does whatever pleases him; he does experiments and ignores the result, blood all over his clothes, his hands examining like a possessed man. The mania of a collector; typical Germanic characteristic, gone wild.

You know what we are? A private zoo.

If twins are the lucky ones—and we are, even with all this—then Esther and I are the most fortunate of all, almost up to the end.

Maybe Mengele likes us more than the rest. Maybe his hated bureaucrats keep us safe, more in what they miss than what they do.

One day, early 1945, our luck runs out.

It is bitterly cold. I remember tongues of fire and smoke from the crematorium stacks, the air full with stench of burning bodies, the walls bouncing with screams of the damned, everywhere the rat-tat of machine guns fired point-blank.

The fires were so big; Allied aircraft must have seen them.

Why didn’t they bomb? Why didn’t they come and blow us all to bits?

Mengele comes rushing in, gone berserk.

“The Bolsheviks are coming!” he screams. “The Bolsheviks are coming! All this will fall into their hands. Well, I won’t have that. Not in a thousand year.”

He starts putting everything in his trunk: papers, stationery, instruments. Pack, pack, pack, all very fast, not another word spoken to us, his face distorted in frenzy.

And then he stop, eyes blazing. Shouts he could still make great scientific discovery that will save the Reich.

He has insane ideas, many, many, almost all; but the most lunatic, if you ask me, is that he can make blond hair and blue eyes. Genetic engineering, he calls it.

He looks round the room, and he stops on Esther and me, because we are the most dark there: black hair, brown eyes.

If he can make it work on us, he can make it work on anybody.

He takes us into a small room. Every nurse, he tells them to come, hold us down.

I start to scream. I know what he is going to do.

Mengele works at a table. He takes huge needle and fills it with vile chemical. I think, as I watch, that it spits like a snake.

The dose must be stronger than ever before, he says. Previous experiments did not work because dosage too weak. He is almost shouting.