Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz

by Lucette Matalon Lagnado, Sheila Cohn Dekel

Overview

During World War II, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele subjected some 3,000 twins to medical experiments of unspeakable horror; only 160 survived. In this remarkable narrative, the life of Auschwitz's Angel of Death is told in counterpoint to the lives of the survivors, who until now have kept silent about their heinous death-camp ordeals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140169317
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/1992
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	241,589
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lucette Matalon Lagnado was born in Cairo, Egypt. She is the 2008 recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest cash award in the Jewish book world. As an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has covered health care for a decade. She has been a finalist or received prizes from, among others, Columbia Journalism School, the University of Missouri, and the University of Southern California.

Sheila Cohn Dekel is the widow of Alex Dekel, an Auschwitz survivor.

Table of Contents

Children of the Flames - Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel Preface: Candles in the Night
Dramatis Personae
Prologue: The Jazz Bar
1. Mengele and His Children
2. Auschwitz Movie
3. The Angel of Death
4. The Angel Vanishes
5. The Trial That Never Was
6. The Story of Andreas
7. Fugitive's Idyll
8. The Angel Retreats
9. Brazilian Hideaway
10. The Scholar and the Preacher
11. The Burial of the Dead
Afterword: Children of the Flames - The Roll Call
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

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. Photos. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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

Library Journal

YA-- A horrifying yet spellbinding account. Although Mengele was a mediocre doctor, he was encouraged in his pursuit of ``genetic research'' to create a ``master Aryan race'' with the concentration camp at Auschwitz providing an ample supply of specimens for his unscientific, poorly documented experiments. Twins were his fixation, and this book interviews some of the estimated 100 survivors from an initial sample of 3000 young people. The fascination of this book is that it follows the lives of both Mengele and the twins in their readjustment to life away from the camps. This gripping tale is extremely readable and well documented, offering another facet to the human tragedy of the Holocaust.-- Pam Spencer, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA

School Library Journal