DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN Read Online Free PDF Page B

me immediately because I didn’t look Jewish. I had very blond hair, and blue eyes, and I was in excellent physical shape. When he started talking to me, I answered him in fluent German.
    Mengele wasn’t only looking for twins-he wanted triplets, midgets, hunchbacks, any unusual types. Even people like me-Jews who looked like perfect Aryans. He asked me to step out of the line. I looked around for my mother, but she had disappeared.
    I prayed that she was among a group of women who had been selected to live.
    Mengele’s mother was the archetypal German hausfrau whose life revolved around her children. Photographs show a heavyset woman with a stern, homely face and dark, scowling eyes. Unlike her husband, who adopted an aristocratic demeanor with his growing wealth, Walburga made no attempt to alter her dowdy and matronly appearance.
    In the fashion of older peasant women, she dressed almost entirely in black.
    “Wally” Mengele suffered from a terrible weight problem, which stemmed from her lone indulgence: food. She simply loved to eat.
    One Gunzburg woman who knew her well, now relocated to New York’s affluent Westchester County, spins story after story about this impassioned craving. Mrs. Mengele’s favorite pastime, she recalls, was the afternoon kaffee klatsch, the get-tog ethers with women friends over coffee and pastry. Over the years, Walburga grew enormous. She ate constantly, compulsively. She became so obese, she could hardly walk.
    She was so massive, she looked almost pregnant. She was so hungry she devoured everything in sight.
    There was a troubling, terrifying side to Mengele’s mother that only a few people saw, such as the workers at her husband’s factory.
    Dr. Zdenek Zofka, the unofficial historian of Gunzburg, says the employees fretted whenever Wally came to visit. She had no compunctions about yelling at them and embarrassing them before the others, according to Zofka, and was inclined to fly into rages at the slightest provocation. They nicknamed her “the Matador,” and instinctively stayed out of her way. Once, she screamed at some female employees for not having washed the factory’s curtains. When they argued it was not their job, she continued to scold and threaten them, thereby earning their lifelong enmity. Over forty years after her death, old Mengele factory workers still harbor bitter feelings toward the indomitable Walburga Mengele.
    Mengele’s mother was larger than life, and she loomed as a gigantic figure in Josefs life-impossible to escape, equally impossible to please. She could be warm and maternal, or she could behave like a raging bull. Her reactions were impossible to predict. In an unpublished autobiography he wrote many years after the war, Mengele recounted a day when his father came home with a wonderful surprise for the family: a new automobile. The three boys were overjoyed. Karl invited his wife to come out and join them for a ride. But Walburga was livid. How dare he indulge in such a large purchase-such an extravagance-without her approval? Karl tried to soothe her, to no avail, and finally exploded and threatened to leave her. According to his account, Josef listened, petrified, to his parents’ quarrel. After his father had left the room, the little boy went over to comfort his mother.
    “I will always stay with you,” he told her.
    HEDVAH AND LFAH STERN: When they opened the door to our cattle car, our mother became very frightened. “Stay with me, children,” she told us, refusing to let go of our hands.
    But then some prisoners told her in Yiddish,
    “Tell them you have twins.
    There is a Dr. Mengele here who wants twins. Only twins are being kept alive.”
    But our mother didn’t want to be separated from us. She said,
    “No, you are coming with me,” and continued walking toward the crematorium.
    We were thirteen-and-a-half years old when our family was sent to Auschwitz from our small town in Hungary. There were a lot of Jews living in that