Interned to Mengele

September 24th, 1943, ten pm.
Auschwitz.
Under the terms of my internship to Dr. Mengele, I will recount my and my benefactor’s actions during my stay here at Auschwitz camp.

I arrived at the camp via train just under three days ago, and was met at the stops by Mengele himself. He was watching the bedraggled group of prisoners being offloaded, like cattle, onto the platform.
“Sir, reporting for duty to Führer.” I said, pulling off a crisp salute, but Mengele was leaning against a column and smoking a roll-up, and he didn’t notice. I stepped up beside him and watched the Jews and Gypsies being sorted into two lines.
“What do you see here Hraben?” He said, not taking his eyes off the bewildered, cowed victims of order. I studied the faces of the men, stern but fear in their eyes. The women were more frightened for their children than for themselves, and the younger ones were incapable of comprehending. So I looked to the older children, and there I saw comprehension, and the selfish fear of teenage years. They stood; back to their parents yet close enough to feel comfort, trying to hide their gut-wrenching fear.
“I see terrified people.” I thought, but instead, I said,
“I see the thorn in Germany’s side.” Mengele smiled grimly and blew a cloud of smoke into the cold Polish air.
“I see a new dawn in science and medicine. I see the lungs that will breath new life into Führer’s dream.” He said, and straightened up as an SS soldier broke ranks and marched up to us.
“Dr. Mengele, we have the zwillinge for you, will you take them yourself?” He asked. Twins? I thought. Mengele shook his head.
“Have a detachment send them through to the compound, I will take Hraben here via the crematorium.” He said in reply, stubbing out his roll-up on the column.
“Come, I have a car.” He said, and I retrieved my bag and hurried after him.

I sat in the car, watching in horror through the frosted glass window as armfuls of mewling newborns were dumped unceremoniously onto the roaring flames, as rotting, frozen corpses were forced into the huge ovens by their hundreds.
“This is as close to hell as you’ll see. We will be working to stop the need for this, to stem the dark breed and to bring forth our Aryan brethren to the next generation.” He said, and I noted with some curiosity that there was a tinge of pride in his voice. All I wanted to do was get as far away from the place as possible; the smell had reached my nostrils, and I found, to my disgust, that my mouth was watering.
“Please, let us leave this place.” I croaked, watching as a small girl of eight was separated from her screaming mother and hurled to the blaze. Mengele started up the engine and soon we were gone, though when I turned to look I could still see the glow from the fires and the smoke rising in a pillar into the air.

I arrived at the large brick building that was Mengele’s quarters and surgery, and was shown a small, scrubbed room with a cot in one corner and a washbasin in the opposite. I placed my bag next to the bed and undressed, slipping under the covers and trying to clear my head of the images I had witnessed. I would not sleep that night, or the next. But on my fourth day, I witnessed something that made me forget what I had seen for a long time.


September 26th, 1943, eleven pm.
Birkinau.
I was called to the upper room, and saw Mengele chatting to a young boy of nine or ten. He was very amiable, and the boy was clearly at ease with the older man. I washed my hands at the sink as I was instructed, then joined the two.
“Doctor.” I greeted him formally. Mengele glanced at me, and then looked back to the boy.
“Hraben, I was you to meet Franco, Franco, meet my new friend Hraben.” He said to the boy. The young child looked at me and grinned.
“Hello Hraben, do you like lollypops? I like lollypops.” Said the boy, holding up a small sweet Mengele had given him. Mengele said goodbye to the boy and led me across the room.
“What are we doing today sir?” I asked, getting an idea of what would be required. I looked through a glass window he had led me to and saw another boy, the same age as Franco. He looked similar, but was a little bulgier and had lighter hair.
“A twin, Franco and Giorgio. All I want is for you to sit here, and take notes on anything that the other boy feels through the test.” He said, handing me a clipboard and a pen. I looked at him quizzically.
“What test?” I asked. Mengele took up a tray of cruel, sharp objects and blades.
“Live vivisection.” He said coolly, and before I could comprehend what had happened he was striding off back to where an unsuspecting Franco waited eagerly for his slow, painful death. I tried to block it out, to do what I had been asked of me, but while Giorgio merely nodded off to sleep, I could hear his brother’s screams of confusion, then terror and finally excruciating pain behind me as the skin of his abdomen was opened and peeled away, and his organs were one by one dissected and studied. Eventually the screams stopped, and with a gurgling sound Franco was no more. I flinched as the half-finished lollypop fell to the ground with a clink. There was silence, until finally I heard the taps turn on and Mengele scrubbing the blood off his hands. He stood beside me and looked on as Giorgio turned in his sleep.
“Has anything happened?” He asked. I shook my head, and showed him the few notes on Giorgio’s progress. Mengele looked at the sleeping boy, and a frown crept across his face. He turned away and, picking up a bone saw, plunged it through Franco’s exposed rib cage. I yelped in fright as Giorgio sat up suddenly, screaming his head off.
“I’d mark that down, if I were you.” Mengele said to me as I lay on the ground with my hands over my ears, before walking out of the room.

I slept fitfully when I finally did, Giorgio’s screams returned night after night to my mind. I dreamt of the boys, seeing Giorgio, crouched foetal position in the corner of his room, and Franco standing, pale-faced above him, his chest devoid of skin and the blood-stained saw in his hands.
“Why?” Franco would ask, over and over, “Why?” and Giorgio would scream louder and louder.

The day came soon when Mengele decided to move his studies to Giorgio, and he asked me to help. I did not want to, and the thought of what we were doing made me sick, so much so that bile burned away at the back of my throat. He left me in the room with the child, who had cried in his sleep and was so hoarse from screaming he could not utter even a whisper. I sat there and made forced conversation with the fraught child, who refused to answer. The food he had been given, good food, lay rotting and untouched in the corner of the cell. Eventually Mengele returned to the room, and crouched before the young boy.
“Giorgio? Can you hear me? It’s Joseph, do you remember me? We are going to help; we are going to take you to your brother. Do you want to see him?” He asked. I convulsed, wanting to purge myself of my memories, but the boy didn’t notice; he perked up and his grey eyes lit up with excitement. He nodded profusely, and took Mengele’s hand when he offered it. I followed behind a few paces and tried not to think about what I was doing. We came to a stainless steel door and Mengele opened it without a key, and led us through. It looked like a cross between a dentist surgery and a medieval torture chamber, and in some respects it was. Mengele sat Giorgio in the chair and told the boy to wait a moment; he needed to do something before he could take him to his brother. We scrubbed our hands and arms, and Mengele began the test.
“Hraben, secure the subject.” He ordered me, and I tried to be impassive as I took the feeble boy and strapped his wrists and ankles to the chair. He just looked up at me and a tear crept up from the corner of his eye. I closed mine and waited for Mengele to speak.
“It’s a time test; we produce an incision in parts on the body and time the clotting and healing process. Hand me that scalpel.” He said, and I placed the small, impossibly sharp blade in his waiting hand. I turned away, but I could still hear the tearing sound of the parting skin.
“Underarm, three, four…” He counted off, staring at his watch and not at the boy reacting to the painful cut along his right underarm. It took ten seconds to clot, and the process started again, listing them off in order; his stomach, his thigh, his forearm, and finally the soles of his feet and his wrists. I had not expected it with the amount of blood lost, but Giorgio was still alive, so Mengele did a final test; the temple. I could not watch, and so I busied myself disinfecting the cleaning equipment for when he’d finished. I could hear behind me Mengele call for someone to retrieve the body of the now drained boy. An escort of one SS soldier and three men from the camps came to haul the body to the crematoria.
“You don’t like what I’m doing?” Mengele asked my turned back when everyone had left. I slowly shook my head, wondering what to expect.
“A debased act for no reason is evil, and I have no doubt that what I do is debased. But my reason is not hollow, come, let me show you something.” He opened the door and I followed his lead, until eventually we reached a small room. I opened it and saw a number of chairs and a table, and two large, solid but un-extraordinary bookshelves. He drew from the closer of the two a large album and took them to a table. He opened it to a page book marked and stood aside. I saw a photo of a German man; horse ploughing a field and clearly not coping. I could see a tractor in the background, out of use and falling apart from disrepair.
“See this Aryan man, Gods child, breaking his back to provide food for the people. He is physiologically perfect, but he is forced to labour for the betterment of the nation.” He turned a page, and I saw a trio of Jewish men, standing in the street conversing as they paid for groceries to another Jewish man.
“See the Jew, see how he stands in finery and pays comfortably for all his needs, how he has time left after his duties are done to converse on meaningless topics.” He closed the book with a thud and I stared into his eyes.
“Why should the Alpha beings pander to the needs of a plague to our economy? Why should not there be only perfection, and this disease wiped from our race?” He said viciously, and for a brief moment I forgot all about the fires, all about the screams. All I could think of was his words, and how fervently I agreed. After all, this was why I had joined the party to begin with. Why should not the glorious end be achieved at the expense of a few lives?

October 4th, 1943, twelve pm.
Auschwitz.
Here I stand, watching the fires once again, but this time with a different purpose. I was watching the lines, looking to see if any subject cases had been missed by the original inspection. I had progressed to actively helping Joseph in the tests, and now I could not even understand my original trepidation. Of course what we were doing was right; why else would Führer support our work? I got into the car and sighed; who knew how many subjects for eye pigmentation tests we could have picked up but lost due to carelessness. We had two new sets of twins and their mother, as well as a man with giantism. This lot would keep us steady for a week and a half.

We were working tirelessly; our work consumed me more wholly than the pain consumed the poor man I was working on. I drilled deeper into the femur, and withdrew the drill bit from the exposed cross-section, scraping the jelly-like marrow into a sample bag. Mengele sat at the other end of the room, large chunk of meat taken from the mother’s brain sitting on the table he was sitting at. He was inspecting it carefully, and from the look of care, concern on his face, and the tenderness he showed in his work, he was a like one of the depictions of angles I had seen in churches in Munich. An angel.

An Angel of Death.