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Monday, February 15, 2016

Last night I met someone who met Josef Mengele

Last night my wife and and I went to a wedding and we took an elderly lady with us who needed a ride. I'll call her Edna.

On the way home she told me a story.

There is a special prayer said on the Sabbath before a new moon, asking for health and peace for the upcoming month. Edna's father (she reflexively says "alav hashalom," may he rest in peace after mentioning him) always told his family that it was very important to go to shul on the last Sabbath of the month in order to make this blessing, saying that the blessing protects them for the coming month. If the prayer is not said, no one knows what will happen.

Hungarian Jews arriving in Auschwitz three days after this story
In May 1944, when Edna was 14, the Jews of her town in Hungary were rounded up and placed in a temporary ghetto. On Saturday, May 20, they were herded out to the courtyard of the  synagogue. There were no prayers that day. Instead, they were chased from that courtyard to cattle cars.

Edna said that of course there were no seat in the cattle cars, everyone had to lie on the floor. There were two holes to use as toilets but no privacy.

Three days later they arrived at Auschwitz.

First the males were separated from the females, and then there was the "selection." Edna and her younger sister were holding their mother's hand.

Mengele
Edna says an SS officer, a good looking blonde man, told her to go one way while her mother would go the other. She said she didn't want to leave her mother, and the man - Josef Mengele - used his baton to hit her hand that she was using to hold her mother's hand, and she was forced to let go out of pain. Then she was separated from her mother and sister (her older sister had already been separated.)

That was the last that Edna saw of her mother. Both her parents were murdered on May 23, 1944, the first day of the new month of Sivan.

Edna still associates their deaths with not being able to pray to God for a safe new month the Sabbath beforehand when she was herded from the ghetto.

Edna is one one the few people left alive who had seen pure evil, face to face.

(Edna only told me that her parents were killed on Rosh Chodesh Sivan. I looked up the dates based on that and the history of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Mengele was known to use a baton to signal which prisoners would be put to death and which would get a reprieve, as described in Elie Wiesel's Night.)


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