Children of the Flames

Mengele was in charge of the ``selection process'' at the death camp Auschwitz, but he was also a genetic scientist with a special interest in twins. During the war he subjected some 3000 twins, mostly young, to experiments of unspeakable horror. Only 160 of them were alive when the Russians liberated Auschwitz in 1945. The authors have interviewed several of the surviving twins and here present their stories, including details of their postwar lives. One especially disturbing aspect of the book is the fact that some of the victims remember Mengele as a charming father-substitute in whom they yearned to place their trust. There are glimpses of Mengele joking with the children, taking them on outings, hugging them. One survivor insists he was gentle; another flatly states that he ``loved little children.''

Woven skillfully into the narrative is a formal and engrossing biography of Mengele himself, his family background, his wartime career, his escape to South America, his years in hiding. None of the surviving twins believes that the remains found in Brazil in 1985 are those of the death-camp doctor; according to the authors, they are certain that Mengele has succeeded in ``tricking the world yet another time.'' An important addition to the literature of the Holocaust. Lagnado is a freelance writer, Dekel is the widow of an Auschwitz twin.

Fiche Technique

• ISBN-13: 9780140169317
• Author: Lucette Matalon Lagnado, Sheila Cohn Dekel
• Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
• Publication date: 05/28/1992

Library Journal

The children of the title are the surviving twins of Auschwitz whom Mengele saved from death in order to use them for his research on ``Biology As Destiny,'' his fixation to create a racially pure German people. But the book is more accurately the story of Mengele as culled from his writings, official documents, and fiction. The twins' stories, moving and upsetting, are framework and background to the portrait of Mengele as Victor Frankenstein. Their anguished recollections of Auschwitz and attempts to create a life after such a traumatic experience alternate in different print with the Mengele biography, right up to his recorded--but never confirmed--death in 1985. This is a well-written and well-researched book, enhanced by a scholarly list of sources on the ghoulish Mengele and his life. For a book on the Romanian Holocaust, see Siegfried Jagendorf's Jagendorf's Foundry: Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust, 1941-1944 , reviewed in this issue, p. 98.--Ed.--Gerda Haas, Holocaust Human Rights Ctr. of Maine, Augusta