The Holocaust

Marc Berkowitz and his twin sister Francesca were two of Mengele’s victims. Arriving at Auschwitz from Czechoslovakia in March 1944 with their mother, 12-year-old Marc and his twin sister, Francesca, were singled out by Mengele for medical experimentation:

"Before the experiments began, Mengele came and tattooed my number personally. They put us in freezing baths, smeared chemicals on our skin, but it was the needles we were most afraid of. After the first 150 injections I stopped counting ... One morning in July 1944 I spotted my mother among a long line of women moving toward the gas chamber. Mengele called me in and gave me an errand to the crematorium. He knew I would see my mother go to her death. A couple of days later he asked me if I still believed in God."

Years later, Marc Berkowitz still suffered from pains due to the injections.

The Children

When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, Isabella Leitner and her family were herded in a ghetto and finally sent to Auschwitz where her mother and baby sister were gassed immediately. Isabella, the author of several books about the Holocaust, was exposed to horrors that words cannot describe, tortured, used. She later remembered the arrival at Auschwitz:

"I packed for my journey to Auschwitz on May 28, 1944 - my 20th birthday. As we alighted from the cattle car - my mother, my brother and my four sisters - there was Mengele, looking magnificent with his dog, his pistol, his riding crop. He sent my mother to the crematorium immediately. She was too old to live. And my youngest sister, Potyo, she was too young for him at 13 ...  Mengele was as smooth, as civilized, as elegant as you can imagine, good-looking even. You would never suspect the evil. He was the genius of death. I have a sort of revenge. It would kill Mengele to see that I gave birth to two of the most magnificent, beautiful, intelligent children ... "

Isabella Leitner survived - not as a destroyed soul, not as a person utterly crushed by suffering, but as a wonderful, open woman with pure delight in life.

Pics Of Horror

A surviving Mengele twin, Moshe Offer, later recalled the death of his brother:

"Dr. Mengele had always been more interested in Tibi. I am not sure why - perhaps because he was the older twin. Mengele made several operations on Tibi. One surgery on his spine left my brother paralyzed. He could not walk anymore. Then they took out his sexual organs. After the fourth operation, I did not see Tibi anymore. I cannot tell you how I felt. It is impossible to put into words how I felt. They had taken away my father, my mother, my two older brothers - and now, my twin ..."

The Auschwitz Children

Irene Hizme and her twin brother, Rene Slotkin, were born in Czechoslovakia and were only four years old when they were taken with their mother to Theresienstadt. Shortly afterward, they were sent to Auschwitz, where they were separated. They never saw their mother again. They survived for almost three years in Auschwitz where they were experimented on by Josef Mengele as part of his twins research. Irene later recalled:

"I remember the first time I saw Mengele he was wearing green, dark green. And I remember his boots. That was probably the level my eyes were. Black, shiny boots. He was asking for  twins, twins  ..."

"The first time we went to the infirmary, he took blood. It was very painful ... They gave me injections in the arm and the back, and X-rays. I'd be extremely sick for a while."

After the war, Irene was adopted by a family on Long Island and spent several years tracking down Rene, who was still in Europe. In 1950, the family was finally able to bring him to the United States and reunite the twins. And both got married with children.

Courage And Survival

Frank Klein was interned at Auschwitz-Birkenau for seven months. He later recalled how he and his family arrived at the Auschwitz railhead:

"The first time I saw Mengele was the day I arrived at the camp with my twin brother, Otto, my mother, my aunt and my sister. One of the men on the train platform asked my mother if Otto and I were twins. When my mother said, "Yes," he said, "I'll be right back." A few minutes later, he took us to Mengele. For the next hour we watched the selection process. My mother was sent to the gas chamber, and so was my aunt.

My brother and I survived and I've had a nightmare ever since the camp. I dream that Mengele is taking my brother away to kill him ..."

Graphic Photos

At 19, in March 1943, Ernest Michel arrived in Auschwitz after five days and four nights in cattle cars. He was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1923 to a Jewish family which had been living in Germany for over 300 years. He was arrested on September 3, 1939, three days after the outbreak of World War II, and spent the next five-and-one-half years in slave labor and concentration camps.

Ernest Michel, Auschwitz number 104995, worked as an orderly in the Auschwitz infirmary and later recalled Mengele:

"One day in the summer of 1944 we took eight women, mostly young and all healthy, into the room where the experiments would take place. I saw Mengele standing there in his uniform, surrounded by three or four others. As we brought in each girl, an officer would strap her down. After a while the screaming inside stopped. When we took them out two of the eight were dead, five were in a coma, one was still strapped to the cot. Mengele was standing there, discussing it very casually. The only word I could hear was 'experiment'."

Ernest Michel's parents, grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins were all murdered by the Nazis, gassed in Auschwitz. He survived and arrived in the United States in 1946. He was active in the survivor community for many years and served as Chairman of the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors in Israel in 1981.