On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, we went to the blood lab. Miriam and I sat on a bench with another set of twin sisters. Someone tied our upper left arms and right arms with thin, flexible, rubber hoses. Two people worked on me at the same time. A doctor jabbed a needle into my left arm to take blood. He withdrew a vial’s worth and then stuck me again. I could see hands taking away bright red vials of my blood. I remembered wondering, “How much blood can I lose and still live?” Meanwhile a different doctor gave me an injection of something in my right arm. He stuck five needles in without removing the first one. What was he shooting into my remaining blood?
I hated shots. But I refused to cry out in pain because I did not want to let the Nazis know they were hurting me. I coped by turning my head away and counting the shots until it was over.
On our way back to our barracks, Miriam and I did not talk about the shots. I took those shots as the price we had to pay to survive: we gave them our blood, our bodies, our pride, our dignity, and in turn, they let us live one more day. I cannot remember a single twin who did not cooperate.
In those days we didn’t know what the experiments were for or what we were injected with. Later we found out that Dr. Mengele purposely gave some twins dangerous, life-threatening diseases such as scarlet fever, then followed them with shots of something else to see if it cured the disease. Some shots were attempts to change the color of eyes.
Older girls, many years After we were all liberated, told us Mengele had taken them to a lab and given them a transfusion of blood from a boy, and had transfused their blood into the bodies of boys. He wanted to discover a way to change girls into boys and boys into girls. Many of these details I learned forty years later, such as the twin teenage boys who had some of their private parts cut off in Mengele’s quest to see if he could turn them into girls. One of those boys died in his bed right next to his twin, who said later, “I could feel my brother’s body turning cold.”
It was said at the time that six sets of twins had gone to that lab and been killed. I never witnessed anyone being killed; I only knew that some of the twins disappeared. But I did eventually learn that the rumors were correct, that twins were dying from some of the experiments. We were told they had become “very sick.” Then Mengele would simply replace them with fresh sets of twins who had just arrived on transport trains. That is how even the most privileged prisoners at Auschwitz were viewed. Not even Mengele’s favorites were treated as humans. We were replaceable. Disposable.
What was not replaced were our pretty, matching dresses, which got so worn out we could no longer wear them. We were given women’s clothing. But the clothing was too big, so Miriam and I tied strings around our waists to hold up the dresses. In the tops of our dresses we tucked anything we were carrying, like a metal cup or a piece of bread saved from the night before.
In the morning before roll call and on the days we went to the blood lab, we helped take care of the younger children. Outside our barracks we had a fenced-in yard where we played with them. The older girls taught Miriam and me how to knit. We pulled pieces of barbed wire from the fencing, hit the wires against stone to loosen the barbs, and pulled them off. It took a long time. Then we sharpened the points of the wire on some rocks to make knitting needles. One of the twins had an old sweater that we took apart, saving the yarn. Each girl took a turn knitting until the yarn from the sweater was all used up. Then the next person would unravel the yarn, and we would start all over again. It was not about a finished product—a cap, a scarf, or socks. Knitting took our minds off of our troubles.
But death and danger were never far away. One day when we were outside, a cart of dead bodies rolled by. We ran to the fence to see if we recognized any of the corpses.
One girl cried out, “Mama! It’s my mama!” and burst into tears. She sobbed, her anguish crescendoing into wails, as the cart continued on its way. I felt sorry for her, but I did not know what to say.
At that moment I realized that maybe our mother had also gone by on a cart of bodies; we just hadn’t seen her. Every day those carts went by. Sometimes the prisoners on them were dead, sometimes only mostly dead; regardless, they were all being carted away to their final resting place. Until that moment I had stopped thinking about my family. Maybe it was due to the bread we ate each evening that supposedly contained not only sawdust but a powder called bromide that made us forget memories of home, a sedative of some kind. Whatever it was or was not, I could not feel sorry for myself, for Miriam, for anyone. I could not think of myself as a victim, or I knew I would perish. It was simple. For me, there was no room for any thought except survival.
At night Miriam and I lay in our bunk with two other sets of twins. We snuggled close but did not talk or whisper. If I had told Miriam how hungry and miserable I was, it would have only made things worse. In the darkness I heard a whistle, a car, or motorcycle going by. Noises of marching, moaning, vomiting, barking, and crying punctuated the hush of camp—an orchestra accompanying the pervasive human misery.
Occasionally when our supervisors were asleep, our old friend from the neighboring village, Mrs. Csengeri, sneaked into our barracks to see her twin daughters. She was a smart, quick-witted woman. Upon her arrival at Auschwitz, she had convinced Dr. Mengele that she could help him by giving him information about her twins, so she had been allowed to stay in the women’s barracks. Mrs. Csengeri brought her children food, underwear, hats, things she had taken or “organized.” “Organizing” was camp language for stealing from the Nazis. I envied those girls for having a mother who was still alive and caring for them; Miriam and I had only each other.
I could not think about Mama, Papa, or our older sisters any more. I had to worry about Miriam and myself. I had to repeat to myself over and over:
Just one more day.
Just one more experiment.
Just one more shot.
Just please, please, don’t let us get sick.
CHAPTER SIX
One Saturday in July we marched to the lab, where I was injected with something that must have been a germ. They gave the shot only to me, not my twin. Years later Miriam and I guessed that they chose me for the shot because they had observed that I was stronger.
What I was not prepared for was that this injection would make me sick. During the night I ran a high fever. My head pounded. My skin burned dry. My body shook so hard that I could not sleep, despite my fatigue. I woke Miriam.
“I’m v-very s-s-sick,” I whispered through chattering teeth into her ear.
She was instantly awake, instantly worried. “What shall we do?”
“I d-d-d-don’t know,” I said. “L-l-let’s t-t-try to hide it and pre-pre-pretend that I’m all r-r-r-ight.”
By Monday morning when we stood outside for roll call, I was really dizzy. My arms and legs were covered with red patches and swollen to twice their size. They were so painful, I thought I would explode out of my skin. I shivered with chills. The sunshine warmed me up a little, and I tried desperately not to tremble so that the pflergerin, or nurses, would not notice I was sick. I did not want to be taken to the infirmary. On two occasions a twin in our barracks had become sick and had been taken to the infirmary. They never came back. The matching twin had then also been taken away and they did not return either. We assumed both of each set of twins were killed once one got sick. I could not let this happen to Miriam and me. Why should she die just because I might die?
Just before roll call actually began, the air raid sirens sounded a loud, piercing warning: We were going to be bombed. With shivering delight I watched the SS guards run for cover as a plane with an American flag painted on one of the wings circled the concentration camp. I thought to myself, “Look at these Nazis, the bullies of the world, running like scaredy cats!” I recognized the Stars and Stripes because our aunt, Papa’s sister, lived in Cleveland, Ohio, and before the war she had sent letters to us with stamps printed with the American flag. Now the plane flew low and made a yellow smoke circle above the entire camp. Even in those days, we knew that the plane would not bomb inside the circle. More planes followed, and in the distance we heard bombs exploding. The American planes gave us hope. The planes meant that help was coming. Someday soon we would be freed and get to go home—if we could just stay alive long enough. We kids clapped; those were our moments of glory.