DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN by CHILDREN OF THE FLAMES Page B

were shaved. The women were then given either a regulation striped uniform or absurd, ill-fitting rags to wear. Their shoes were usually too large or too small, often consisting of a “pair” of one flat slipper and one high heel. The effect was to make the women look ridiculous and thoroughly un alluring to everyone-including their Aryan guards.
    Occasionally, the Nazi system failed, and a woman radiated beauty, her shapeless garments and shorn hair notwithstanding. Mengele encountered such a woman in lbi Hillman. Tall, blond, and statuesque, fifteen-year-old Ibi had been the pride of her small village in Transylvania. When Ibi removed her uniform in the course of an “inspection,” Mengele found himself staring at her, transfixed. The other female inmates, and even his own assistants, watched him, aware of his attraction to the young Jewish woman. Any other SS officer would have simply made her his mistress. But Mengele evidently could not and would not concede feeling an attraction toward a Jew. In a loud voice, he dispatched Ibi to the infamous Block Ten, where the Nazis were performing sinister gynecological experiments. Few women survived Block Ten.
    A few weeks later, Ibi was spotted by some inmates wandering by herself, in a daze. They hardly recognized her. The beautiful young girl looked like a shriveled old woman. Her slender limbs were now swollen and disfigured, while her stomach was bloated from the numerous surgeries that had been performed on her. Sickly and grotesque, Ibi Hillman no longer held any possible attraction-for Dr. Mengele or any other male.
    Mengele also seemed to take a perverse pleasure in exterminating women who were pregnant. “This is not a maternity ward,” he replied easily, when asked why these women were sometimes automatically sent to die.
    Mengele even boasted he was being “humanitarian In having these women killed. Auschwitz, he would point out, had no facilities to take care of newborn children. But Mengele fluctuated erratically in his policy.
    Some weeks, he issued orders that pregnant women were to be kept alive and given every consideration. Other weeks, he ordered them killed immediately. At times, Mengele permitted a woman to deliver her baby, but then he promptly dispatched mother and infant to the gas chambers.
    Even by Auschwitz standards, Mengele’s obsessive cruelty to pregnant women stood out. When he first met an expectant inmate, Mengele liked to quiz her at length about her condition. He asked dozens of precise, detailed questions that allowed him to assume the protective coloration of a concerned physician. But the questions were often more personal than scientific, more voyeuristic than impartial. When did she become pregnant, he wanted to know, before or after arriving at Auschwitz? By whom? In what circumstances was the child conceived? In posing the questions, Mengele would try to maintain his usual detachment, but the intensity of his curiosity seemed odd both to the unfortunate women he addressed and to the assistants who overheard such exchanges.
    Pregnancy, after all, was an everyday occurrence. And unlike twins, triplets, dwarfs, or giants, pregnant women could hardly be deemed a scientific phenomenon.
    MAGDA SPIEGEL: Pregnant women were always coming to Mengele’s office.
    He wanted to be present at the birth of their children-he wanted to be present during each and every birth at Auschwitz.
    There were red-brick ovens in the middle of the barracks. The women were forced to give birth on these ovens: That was where Mengele “delivered” the babies. These poor women were given nothing, no pillows, no blankets.
    JUDITH YAGUDAH: If a woman was pregnant, or even if Mengele simply thought she was pregnant, he sent her immediately to the gas chambers.
    My aunt, my mother’s sister, was a bit overweight. She had a stomach.
    Mengele was convinced she was pregnant, and so he sent her to be gassed.
    Mengele’s Jewish assistants, like Dr. Gisella Perl, took