The story of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz “doctor,” is chillingly interspersed with a kind of Greek chorus of the voices of those who survived his sick and brutal experiments. I found this book because the author, Lucette Lagnado, wrote a memoir I just read (and noted further down this page). Her memoir was about her childhood in Egypt and Brooklyn and had absolutely nothing to do with this subject matter so it seemed a strange coincidence that she would have written a book about a topic I read closely. Her telling of the Mengele’s life, from a starry childhood in Germany through his time as a revered or reviled member of the Third Reich to his strange and isolated life in hiding in South America, is boldly woven with interviews with the Jewish children who survived him and the strange ways their lives after Auschwitz mirrored his. This reminded me of the very first book I read about the Holocaust (Hidden Children of the Holocaust) because it gave voice to people who had NEVER spoken publicly of their suffering before. My friend Melissa can’t believe I have the stomach for it, and I wasn’t able to explain myself. But this book reminds me that I was originally taken in by the courage and honestly of those who survived.
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