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The History of Zvi Spiegel: the Experience of Mengele Twins and Their Protector During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

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The History of Zvi Spiegel: the Experience of Mengele Twins and Their Protector During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath The History of Zvi Spiegel: The Experience of Mengele Twins and Their Protector During the Holocaust and its Aftermath Yoav Heller PhD Candidate 2013 Department of History Royal Holloway, University of London Declaration of Authorship I hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in It is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Yoav Heller Signed: Date: Abstract This thesis tells the story of Zvi Spiegel, who, at the age of 29, after serving in the forced labour units of the Hungarian army, was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. Upon his arrival, Spiegel, a twin himself, was put in charge of the twin boys who were being subjected to medical experiments by Dr Josef Mengele. Over the months, Spiegel emerged as the boys’ leader and saviour. In the aftermath of the war, rather than desert the young twins, he led them on a hazardous journey home to Hungary, over hundreds of kilometres in the midst of chaos and hardship. It was only forty years later that Spiegel reunited with the twins and his achievements were recognized publicly. Through the unique story of Spiegel and his twins, the thesis aims to investigate three main topics, the first of which is Spiegel's evolution into a benign camp functionary. Contrary to the common perception of people who played positive roles in the Holocaust as natural-born heroic types, the evidence presented here shows that at least in the case of Spiegel, he became a helper. Spiegel did not arrive in Auschwitz as a righteous person; rather, having had to make decisions in the ever-complicated reality of the camp’s grey zone, he gradually evolved into a benign functionary—but not without his limitations and doubts. The role of group frameworks within concentration camps is our second focal point. The group created by Spiegel had a lasting impact on the lives of its members, over thirty child twins. As will be demonstrated, Spiegel and the group formed an essential part of the twins’ experience in the camp and in many ways accompanied them throughout their post-war efforts to establish a new life. The final topic relates to Holocaust representation and the image of the hero. In the 1980s, after a long period of silence and agony Spiegel finally shared his story with the public and was celebrated as the man who guided and saved the twins. But even at that stage he did not fully internalize a heroic narrative of the outside world. Spiegel’s post-war life as a whole, and his reluctance to adopt the heroic self-perception, highlight the limitations of Holocaust representation and the inherently un-heroic nature of places like Auschwitz. Even if one chose to help others, it was impossible to escape the moral ambiguity, the all-pervasive presence of death and the collapse of human values. Contents INTRODUCTION……………………………………………...……………………………….………………4-41 CHAPTER I: BETWEEN TRANQUILLITY AND WAR: THE EARLY LIFE OF ZVI SPIEGEL ……………………………………………………………….….…42-55 CHAPTER II: BETWEEN MENGELE AND THE TWINS: SPIEGEL BECOMES THE ZWILLINGSVATER IN AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU……………………....56-89 CHAPTER III: LIFE AND DEATH IN LAGER F: SPIEGEL EMERGES AS THE TWINS’ LEADER AND PROTECTOR………………………..…..….90-125 CHAPTER IV: THE JOURNEY HOME: IN THE MIDST OF CHAOS…………………...…...…..126-155 CHAPTER V: A NEW LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF THE DARK PAST…………………………..156-192 CHAPTER VI: AN OUTBURST OF TESTIMONIES: THE 'TWINS’ FATHER' IS RECOGNIZED……………………………………………………..……193-233 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………..……..234-249 APPENDIX………………………………………………………………………………………..……..250-251 BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES………………………………………………………………...…...252-270 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS…………………………………………………………………………….…..271-272 3 Introduction “Zvi Spiegel was 29 when he entered Auschwitz with his twin sister. He was the oldest of the male twins and helped to save the lives of many of the youngsters who survived to come to Jerusalem today. After his story was told, the inquiry board asked all those in the audience that he had taken care of to stand up. One by one various sets of male twins rose, many of them now balding or gray, to hail the man they called in Hungarian ‘Spiegel Bácsi,’ or Uncle Spiegel. The audience broke into spontaneous applause.”1 In 1985 a mock trial began in Jerusalem, accusing the notorious Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, of crimes against humanity. The survivors present, most of whom were twins, had been the main subjects of Mengele’s medical experiments in Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1943 and 1945. Zvi Spiegel was one of them.2 He and his twin sister Magda were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 from their hometown Munkács in Sub-Carpathian Rus’ which was under Hungarian rule at the time. Upon arrival, when Spiegel, aged 29, heard the guards shouting Zwillinge, Zwillinge! (twins, twins), he immediately identified himself as a twin. At that very moment Mengele arrived and saw Spiegel—who had formerly been an officer in the Czechoslovakian army—standing at attention like a soldier. Mengele immediately approached him, asked him about his background and appointed him supervisor of the younger twins in the Birkenau hospital sub-camp, known as Lager BIIf— Häftlingskrankenbau. From that point, the course of Spiegel’s life changed forever. Beginning as a minor functionary in the camp, he emerged as the guardian of a group of twin boys. His position required him to escort the twins and bring them to the designated place in which the experiments were being conducted, and there to serve as Mengele’s translator. As time went on, Spiegel took on a much more formative role in the camp. He forged the twins into a unified entity, attended to their needs, educated them, comforted them and gave them hope, and on several occasions risked his own life to save theirs. Even though he did not believe that they would live to see liberation, in order to give the twins a spark of hope he promised to take them home one day. 1Thomas L. Freidman, ‘Jerusalem Listens to the Victims of Mengele’, New York Times, 6 February 1985. 2Zvi is Spiegel’s Hebrew name; his full name was Ernst Zvi, and he was mostly known before and during the war as Ernő. 4 When Auschwitz was liberated on 27 January 1945, a group of approximately forty twins surrounded Spiegel, who was about to flee the camp, and reminded him of his prior commitment to them. Spiegel decided to fulfil his promise and led the twins on a journey across Poland, spanning hundreds of miles, arriving at the Soviet border, and traversing Slovakia, Hungary, Sub-Carpathian Rus’ and Romania. Spiegel led the twins— as well as others who joined en route—on foot, by truck and by train amidst the chaos in the region in the war’s aftermath. Eventually, after about six weeks, all the boys but one made it safely home to Hungary. Unlike the general topic of medical experiments in Auschwitz,3 the story of the ‘Mengele twins’ has not yet been the subject of extensive academic research. In the popular sphere there have been a small number of publications and films about them, the most notable effort being LucceteMatalonLagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel’s book Children of Flames (1991), in which the authors document the experiences of a random group of eighteen twins, among them Zvi Spiegel and his sister Magda.4 While the book succeeds in drawing attention to the story of the twins and in describing their experiences in Auschwitz and its aftermath, the authors did not attempt to conduct any systematic scholarly research, nor does their work constitute a comprehensive study 5 based on a wide range of sources. 3One of the notable early attempts to write about the medical experiments was made by Alexander Mitscherlich, the official West German envoy in the Nazi doctors’ trials in Nuremberg (1946). Mitscherlich and his colleague Fred Mielke wrote a book describing the trials: Doctors of Infamy: The Story of the Nazi Medical Crimes (New York, 1949). For other books discussing the Nazi doctors’ medical experiments, see Naomi Baumslag, Murderous Medicine: Nazi Doctors, Human Experimentation, and Typhus (Westport, 2005); George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin, The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human Rights in Human Experimentation (New York, 1992); William R. Lafleur, Gernot Bohme and Susumu Shimazono, Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research (Bloomington, Indiana, 2007); Vivian Spitz, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans (Boulder, 2005). 4LucceteMatalonLagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel, Children of flames: Dr Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz (New York, 1990). 5 Spiegel is also mentioned in Martin Gilbert’s book The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (London, 1986), 688, 755, 782. See also the article by Nancy Segal, which is discussed in Chapters II and VI; Nancy Segal, ‘Holocaust Twins: Their Special Bond’, in Psychology Today, 19: 8 (New York, 1985), 52-8; Yossi Sarid, Pepiczek: He Didn't Know His Name (Jerusalem, 2006), 39; Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe—a Dwarf Family's Survival of the Holocaust (New York, 2004), 144-5, 179, 191; Gerald Astor, The Last Nazi: The Life and Times of Dr. Josef Mengele (New York, 1985), 99, and Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York, 1986), 353. 5 Other popular publications include a memoir by Eva Kor, a twin herself, entitled Surviving the Angel of Death;Pepiczek, which tells the story of a 4-year-old twin in Auschwitz-Birkenau,6 and In Our Hearts We Were Giants, a book about a family of dwarfs who were inmates in Birkenau, and at a certain point were in the same barrack as Spiegel and the twins.7 In addition, there have been at least two documentary films made about the subject: Rene and I and Leo’s Journey: The Story of the Mengele Twins.8 This thesis attempts to tell and analyse the story of a specific group of Mengele twins, albeit a large one.
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