Review by Choice Review
Josef Mengele, a committed racist eugenicist, used his medical position at Auschwitz to perform experiments on prisoners. This journalistic study reviews Mengele's career, simultaneously describing the fate of the surviving twins on whom Mengele had experimented. Mengele was graduated from the University of Munich summa cum laude, with an MD and PhD in anthropology. He became a disciple of Otman von Verschuer, a leading "racial scientist" who received financial support from the Nazis to build an institute specializing in racial studies. Mengele served in the Waffen SS in Russia. After being wounded he got a position as SS doctor in Auschwitz, with the aid of Verschuer. The accounts of the surviving twins are based on interviews that provide moving histories of their lives after liberation and their attempts to come to terms with their experiences. Their stories document the conclusions of recent research about the long-range consequences of massive traumas. This well-written book is marred by some errors: Rudolf Hess, the "deputy Fuhrer," is confused with Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz; the concentration camp Mauthausen is in Austria, not Czechoslovakia; a Doktorfater (sic!) is a major professor; and Hungarians are not Slavs. General readers. -G. M. Kren, Kansas State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Now expanded into a book, by writer Lagnado and Deckel (the widow of a man who was a child prisoner in Auschwitz), this account of a group of twins who survived the notorious experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele first appeared as a Parade magazine cover article. Forgotten in the postwar turmoil, these surviving twins, who were personally selected--and thus saved--by Mengele, ""the Angel of Death,"" as they were marching into the gas chambers, returned to their old homes after the war ended and tried to resume normal lives. Many found it difficult to speak of their experiences, and were haunted by their last farewells to their parents, the memory of the unceasing fires of Auschwitz, and their confused feelings about Mengele himself, who in choosing them had given them a hideously privileged status. Regarded as ""Mengele's children,"" they were spared the gas chambers but were nonetheless subject to the bizarre experiments that the doctor, obsessed with racial purity, performed on what he regarded as perfect subjects--twins. Alternating the voices of the survivors with an account of Mengele's life, Lagnado & Dekel describe the twins' arrival in Auschwitz, their escape from it, the postwar years, and their adult lives. Mengele, a lethal mixture of vanity, insecurity, and ambition, is tracked through his small-town beginnings, his identification with Nazism, his Auschwitz tenure, his flight to South America, and his almost certain death in Brazil in 1979. A moving testimonial to remarkable children, and an affirmation of the human spirit in the face of a universally perceived, monstrous evil. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
