Dr. Mengele's Twins

“And kids crying,” Pearl adds. “There was no food.”

“It was locked,” Helen continues. “No washroom, nothing. A pail in one end and a pail in the other. You have to relieve yourself in front of the whole car. It was degrading, terribly.”

“My sister had an onion,” Pearl recalls. “And she passed it around to have a lick. Just a lick. And her kids cried and cried.”

“Miriam said, 'I only want to live as long as I have food for the children,' ” Helen adds.

“Mengele wasn't beating us or killing us,” Pearl says. “He was kind to us. And how could you hate him, when he was so handsome?”

“And she went right away,” Pearl says flatly, meaning Miriam was killed almost as soon as she arrived at the concentration camp. “The ones who they pushed to the left,” Helen explains, “they were doomed. Straight to the crematorium.”

“They gassed them,” Pearl says.

“They gave them a towel,” Helen chimes in, “and a soap to make believe they were going for a shower, and then when they were inside—”

“—instead of water,” Pearl interjects.

“—the Zyclon gas came down.” Helen's hands are in a fist against her belly.

“That's how my father and my sister and her children died,” Pearl says. “We never saw them anymore.”

The twins didn't understand their relatives' fate at first.

Pearl: “There were women in the barracks from Poland.”

Helen: “They had been already years there.”

Pearl: “They told us.”

Helen: “We asked, 'When will we be reunited with our loved ones?' And she said--”

Helen starts to weep.

Pearl: “They took us by our hand and opened the barracks door—”

Helen: “—and showed us the chimneys. We were a couple feet away from the crematoriums. 'There is where they are,' they said.”

Pearl: “'You will never see them again.' And we started crying.”

Helen: “We didn't believe it; we said, 'How is that possible?' They told us, 'No, you won't see them.' The Polish people were already there like four or five years; they knew how everything worked. So we cried and cried and hugged. And that was it.”

After a week or so in the barracks, the Herskovic twins received a grisly assignment.

“They needed some workers to volunteer,” Pearl recalls. “And Helen and I said, 'Well, maybe if we get out of the barracks, we'll see our brother. Let's volunteer wherever they are taking us.'”

“So we volunteered,” Helen continues. “Two SS men came with dogs and brought two pails and some disinfectant, and they took us to a big warehouse, and we thought we were going to do some work. And then they opened the door and we almost fainted. Oh my God.”

“There was a mountain of bodies,” Pearl recounts. “Dead bodies. We almost fainted, both. Because we never saw dead people before. In the Jewish religion, they didn't display dead bodies; always the casket was closed.”

“So one—the SS man with the dogs—he said, 'Oh, you'll get used to it,'” Helen says.

“We'll see it in our minds until we die,” Pearl says quietly. “Just a big, big mountain. And our job was to first pile them—the Germans were very correct with making everything perfect. So when they dumped the bodies out after they were gassed, they scattered. It wasn't a neat mountain.”

The young women were told to make a neat stack of corpses. “We had to lift them onto the pile,” Helen explains, “wash the floor where the bodies had been, then pile them back on the clean side and wash the other. And the worst thing was that we saw children.” She starts to weep again.

“Because we were looking,” Pearl remembers. “Thinking, Maybe we'll see our nieces.”

“The mouths open,” Helen recounts, “and blood was still coming. They must have been gassed a few hours before.”