Auschwitz_ A Doctor's Eyewitness Account - Miklos Nyiszli [50]
Next day the Gypsy Camp, once so noisy, lay silent and deserted. The only sound was the monotonous chant of the barbed wires rubbing together, while the doors and windows left open banged and squeaked endlessly under the powerful wind of the Volhynian steppes.
Once again Europe’s pyromaniacs had organized a gigantic display of fireworks. Once again the setting was the Auschwitz concentration camp. This time, however, the victims thrown to the flames were not Jews, but Christians: Catholic gypsies from Germany and Austria. By morning their bodies had been transformed into a pile of silvery ashes rising in the crematorium courtyard. The bodies of twelve sets of twins had not been consigned to the flames. Even before sending them to the gas chamber, Dr. Mengele had marked a Z.S. on their chests with his special chalk.
In this collection of bodies there were twins of all ages, ranging from newborn infants to sixteen-year-olds. For the moment, the twelve pairs of corpses were stretched out on the concrete floor of the “morgue.” Bodies of black-haired, dark-skinned children. The job of classifying them by pairs was a tiring one. I was careful not to mix them up, for I knew that if I should render these rare and precious specimens unusable for his research, Dr. Mengele would make me pay for it with my life.
Only a few days before I had been sitting with him in the work room, near the table, looking through the records already set up on twins, when he noticed a faint spot of grease on the bright blue cover of one of the files. I often handled the records in the course of my dissections, and had probably spotted it with a bit of grease. Dr. Mengele shot a withering glance at me and said, very seriously:
“How can you be so careless with these files, which I have compiled with so much love!”
The word “love” had just crossed Dr. Mengele’s lips. I was so taken aback that I sat there dumbfounded, unable to think of anything to say in reply.
XXIV
I CONDUCTED THE PATHOLOGICAL STUDY of the twelve pairs of twins with the greatest possible care. As everyone knows, there are two kinds of twins, one-egg and two-egg. Twins born of the same egg are always identical, both in their internal and external manifestations, and of the same sex. They are variously known as identical, uniovular or monozygotic. Twins born from two separate eggs resemble one another in both their internal and external characteristics, but rather as brothers and sisters do. They are not perfectly identical and, in about half the cases, are of different sexes. They are known as fraternal, biovular or dizygotic.
These remarks constitute, medically speaking, one of the basic laws of heredity concerning twins. This law has been used extensively by those who claim that environmental factors, such as education, nutrition, the illnesses a person may have suffered, etc., influence only slightly his physical, mental and temperamental makeup, whereas heredity plays a much more important role. If the traits a person has received from his forebears occur again and again throughout several generations, they are known as dominant hereditary characteristics.
These dominant hereditary characteristics can either be to the advantage or disadvantage of the individual. For example, a good healthy set of teeth, a thick head of hair that does not thin with the years, or hypertension and, in some families, diabetes. Among the mental illnesses, nervous depression.
These hereditary phenomena, whether they are advantageous or disadvantageous, often appear at birth: a child born with too many fingers or toes would be an example. Other phenomena develop later on and become chronic illnesses, such as epilepsy, asthma, gout, certain forms of hypertension, a few cases of cancer, and the senile cataract of the ocular lens, this last occurring only in people sixty or