For Twins of Auschwitz, Time to Unlock Secrets (original) (raw)
U.S.|For Twins of Auschwitz, Time to Unlock Secrets
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/14/us/for-twins-of-auschwitz-time-to-unlock-secrets.html
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- April 14, 1991
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April 14, 1991
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They are surviving members of what Irene Hizme calls "the most exclusive club in the world": Jewish twins hand-picked by the Nazi physician Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to be guinea pigs, in her words, "for experimentation to develop a master race."
She was 6 years old, and for years afterward she thought she would carry her awful secret to the grave. "To talk about it," she said last week, "is a descent into darkness."
Eva Kor of Terre Haute, Ind., could not bring herself to describe the scenes of horror to her children. "The pain was too great," she said. Fighting a Nightmare
Peter Somogyi, a New Jersey businessman, says he has put the nightmare behind him. But his wife says his cries of torment still awaken him in a cold sweat.
Nearly half a century after they entered the gates of Auschwitz, the Mengele twins are being heard as never before. "Children of the Flames," a book by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel to be released tomorrow by William Morrow, describes the blighted histories of twins who have come forward in recent years. Some, like Mrs. Hizme, who lives in Oceanside, L.I., are forcing themselves to speak in public for the first time.
Mengele selected about 1,500 sets of twins -- Jews, gypsies and others -- for projects conducted at his genetics laboratory. Many died in the research; at the end of the war, fewer than 200 individuals were alive.
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