In groups of five, we marched from Birkenau to the labs in Auschwitz. We entered a big two-story brick building. Miriam and I were forced to take off our dresses, underwear, and shoes. There were boys as well as girls: twenty or thirty sets of twins. In the beginning I was shocked at the sight.
I found out later that boy twins stayed in a separate barracks under better conditions than ours. They were cared for by a young Jewish prisoner, formerly an officer, named Zvi Spiegel, whom Mengele had chosen to supervise them. Zvi intervened to help the little boy twins, convincing Mengele to give them better food and to improve their living conditions; Mengele must have figured all this would make them better guinea pigs. So Zvi, also known as the “Twins’ Papa,” comforted the boys, gave them games to keep their minds active, and taught them bits of geography and math. During the day he would let them kick around a soccer ball made of a bundle of rags to keep them in better physical condition. He also had them memorize each other’s names to make them feel human.
We had no such person in our barracks to lead us and help us form friendships. I never went up to another girl and asked her name or told her mine. We were all alone, just twins with numbers, each of us trying to survive. The only person I had to think about was Miriam.
In that brick building, as I looked around, I noticed some fraternal twins but most were identical like Miriam and me. Later I learned that Dr. Mengele wanted to discover the secret of twinning. One goal of his experiments was to learn how to create blond-haired, blue-eyed babies in multiple numbers to increase the German population. Hitler called Aryans, the blond and blue-eyed, white-skinned Germans “the Master Race”—and we were his human guinea pigs. To study other natural “abnormalities” and to try to figure out how to prevent genetic mutation, Mengele’s research included giants, dwarfs, the handicapped, and gypsies. The dwarfs lived in barracks near ours, and we sometimes saw them walking through camp.
All of us sat completely naked on benches. Boys were there, too. It was very cold. We had no place to hide. It was embarrassing to be there without any clothes. Some girls crossed their legs and covered up with their hands. Others shook with fear while SS guards pointed at us and laughed. The nudity was one of the most dehumanizing things in the camp for me.
Dr. Mengele popped in and out to supervise. Other doctors and nurses in white coats who were inmates or prisoners like us observed us and took notes.
First they measured my head with an instrument called a caliper, made of two pieces of metal, which they pressed against my skull and squeezed. The doctor called out the numbers to an assistant, who wrote notes into a file.
They measured our earlobes; the bridges of our noses; the size of our lips; the width, shape, and color of our eyes. They compared the shade of blue of Miriam’s eyes to the blue of my eyes with a chart of eye colors. Over and over they measured. They spent three to four hours on one ear. Each time the doctors measured me, they measured Miriam to see how we were alike and how we were different. A photographer snapped pictures; an artist drew sketches. Technicians took X-rays, five or six at a time.
Next they asked us questions and gave commands. An inmate who spoke Hungarian and German acted as translator. If I did something, Miriam did the same. “Every time I follow you,” Miriam whispered, “they write something down. They want to see which of us is the leader.” Of course it was me, just as it had always been. After observing us the previous day in the processing center when I had resisted tattooing, they also knew I was a troublemaker.
We sat there for six to eight hours. I hated every second. Finally we were allowed to get dressed and were marched back to our barracks for the evening meaclass="underline" a meager portion of very dark bread, about two-and-one-half inches long.
In the afternoon our supervising nurse made us learn a song in German. It went, “I am a little German child. If not, phooey!” She put us in a circle and made one girl stand in the center. We had to walk around that girl and sing, “Phooey, phooey, phooey!”
“Dirty, filthy Jews!” the nurse shouted at us. “Swine!” She loved that song. It meant we children were disgusting.
We hated that nurse. We called her “Snake” behind her back. She had thick legs and long black hair that she wore in a braid. Snake kept taunting us. “Who do you think you are?” she asked.
We did not answer. She did not expect an answer, either.
“You think you are so smart because you are still alive?” asked Snake. “You’re going to be dead before long. We’re going to kill all of you.”
For the first day or two, Miriam and I cried and cried. But we soon realized that crying would not help anything. We mostly felt numb.
Staying alive was the most important thing. We knew we were alive because of the experiments. Because of a fortunate accident of nature.
Because we were Mengele’s twins.
CHAPTER FIVE
Being in Auschwitz was like being in a car accident every single day. Every single day something terrifying happened.
Within two weeks Miriam and I had to have our heads shaved. Like all the twins in our barracks, we were infested with head lice. Head lice, I learned, lay their eggs on human hair. And they can go from one head to another. The only way to get rid of them is to use a special shampoo, or chemical treatment, and comb hair daily with a fine-toothed nit comb. We had none of these things, so lice multiplied and spread from person to person, onto clothing and bedding—they were everywhere. Lice and fleas nested in our blankets, straw mattresses, and dresses. We were constantly scratching ourselves. Even with our hair chopped off, we still had lice! Miriam and I constantly picked lice off each other and tried to squeeze them dead between our fingernails.
Once a week twins had the privilege of taking a shower. Each of us received a bar of soap. In the huge shower room, we took off our clothes and left them in a pile to be disinfected. Later I learned that the chemical used to disinfect our clothing, Zyklon B, was one of the three chemicals used to gas people to death at Auschwitz. The Nazis combined Zyklon B, which came in gray-blue pellets, with hydrogen cyanide and diatomite to form the chemical mix for mass murder in the gas chambers. The gas, mixed with burning flesh and bones, created that stench I had noticed the first day. It is not a smell a human can ever forget.
Miriam and I stayed close. We always stayed close. Before we washed, we stood in a tub of whitish liquid. It burned my legs and left red blotches. Sometimes the supervisors wiped down our heads and bodies, and the disinfectant stung my eyes. Forty or fifty twins showered at the same time. Dr. Mengele wanted us to be clean and did occasionally have his assistants make attempts to clean up our barracks. Yet the filth and lice from the camp would always return, and we coped with it as best we could.
One time we saw some boys at the shower. I remember looking at them and thinking, “They’re so skinny. I’m glad I don’t look like that.” Actually, I probably did look like that. Miriam too. Her eyes were sunken, and I could count every bone in her body. But I did not feel skinny and pathetic. I needed to see myself as strong.
Dr. Mengele set up a routine for us to follow. Th ree days a week we were forced to march to the labs in Auschwitz for intensive studies that left us exhausted. The other three days we were in the blood labs in Birkenau. One day melded into the next. Every morning after roll call, Mengele came to our barracks for inspection. Smiling, he called us meine kinde, my children. Some of the twins liked him and called him Uncle Mengele. Not I. I was terrified of him. Even in those days I knew he did not care about us like a real doctor.