PHOTOS: View more historic images from Auschwitz as well as images from this week’s memorials
JERUSALEM — There are few people alive today who can recall the ominous grin of the notorious “Angel of Death,” Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Marta Wise is one of them.
“When he smiled you knew it meant danger, because when he was smiling that was when he was at his most sadistic,” said Wise (nee Weiss), an 80-year-old from pre-war Czechoslovakia who lived for two months in Mengele’s experimental barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Mengele, a German officer and physician, was known for conducting cruel, unscientific experiments on inmates, especially Jewish and Gypsy children. He was obsessed with twins and dwarfs. His “research” included attempts to turn dark eyes blue and studies into how twins were conceived, likely with the aim of boosting the fecundity of the Aryan “master race.”
Most of those who came under his care did not survive.
“We lived with a family of Hungarian dwarfs with nine children,” said Wise, recalling how Mengele bounced a 2-year-old boy on his knee and cooed, “Call me Uncle Mengele.” Then he injected the toddler with something that made his skin turn blue, Wise said.
Wise recalled her experiences this month at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, museum and research center in Jerusalem. She spent her final weeks at the camp in Mengele’s barracks with her older sister, Eva.
She and her sister, she said, were also injected with a substance, although they never discovered what.
Just before the camp’s liberation, Wise had one of her most intimate moments with the Nazi doctor. After her sister became sick and was placed in the camp hospital, Mengele allowed Wise to visit her.
“It must have tickled this monster to see this half-dead child come to help her sick, half-dead sister every day,” said Wise, describing how she met Mengele walking to the clinic one day.
A few days later, Russian soldiers arrived and freed the survivors.
“They did not have much but they gave us what they had,” she said, remembering how one soldier handed her a bottle of vodka. Although Wise was only 10 years old, the war and living in hiding before her capture had taught her that commodities could buy life. After they were freed, the sisters gave the vodka to a truck driver who helped them return home to their parents in Bratislava, today the capital of Slovakia.
Before the war, Wise and her sister lived with their parents and eight siblings in a luxurious house in a prestigious neighborhood of Bratislava. Their father, Eugen Weiss, was a self-made textile merchant who was initially considered an “essential Jew” by the Nazis for his business prowess.
It was his mix of business smarts and deep pessimism that helped him save himself, his wife and all but one of his children during the war. In the early years, Wise and her siblings were shipped to relatives in Hungary. Later, Wise and Eva posed as orphaned Aryan girls.
“We went to school every day and to church on Sundays,” Wise said.
It was the perfect cover for the blond, green-eyed girls until neighbors grew suspicious. They were finally arrested Oct. 8, 1944 — Wise’s 10th birthday — and less than a month later they arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“Some survivors say no one helped them, but we had a different experience,” Wise said. “People always tried to help us, and we tried to help people wherever we could.”
But survival, she learned, “is really just pure luck.”
Wise, who moved with her family to Australia in 1948, said her parents never spoke of the war.
“Eva and I did not mention one word about Auschwitz until 1995,” she said, when Eva, who still lives in Australia, spoke at a commemoration event.
Mengele fled Germany and lived in exile in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil until he died in 1979.
Wise, a mother of three, grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother of five, immigrated to Israel with her husband in 1998. She is warm and friendly, but what she has to say is not soothing.
“I used to be an optimist until a few years ago, but the situation in the Middle East has changed. And the world does not notice anything,” she said, speaking days after the terror attacks in Paris. “Reading the newspaper in the past few days is just like reading the newspaper in the 1930s.”
“The world has not changed at all,” Wise said. “The bottom line is it can happen again and it is happening again in many places, not necessarily to the Jews, but to anyone.”
