Customer Reviews

Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz

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Well-written book, easy to read. Actually one of the better ones about subject of Mengele and Auschwitz. No lengthy boring descriptions or statistical speculations. Just good writing mixed with moving quotes of survived victims. I've read many books about Mengele and all of them were dry and filled with assumptions. This book states simple facts supported by eyewitness accounts. A lot of times I had to put this book away to digest all the evil that was done to those poor children. Reading "Children of the Flames" is like being on the emotional roller coaster. This book will grab you by your heart and deeply move you. There are not enough words to describe the pain and suffering that happened. Very accurate account. If I could read only one book about Mengele this would be the one.

Both my parents served in the armed forces overseas during World War II, and it was through them, as a young adult, I heard of the "children of the flames" and the horrors of the concentration camps. When the book was first published, it caught my attention for that very reason. "Children of the Flames" is not an easy book to read simply because of the subject matter. However, the authors have managed to relate the story in a way that tells of the evil acts committed but in as diplomatic a manner as possible. The attrocities are almost too bloodcurdling to conceive. For me, it was impossible to read "Children of the Flames" in one sitting, especially the interviews which actually describe life and the experiments at Auschwitz.

This is the story of Josef Mengele and his "children of Auschwitz". Selecting primarily twins (or others who caught his eye) from the multitudes of Jews headed for the gas chambers, Mengele used these innocent children to satisfy his own perverse needs, all in the name of research, as human guinea pigs for his own horrendous experiments. The book is based upon interviews with survivors of Mengele's twins, and the reader will quickly discover, there are few survivors. The interviews tell the life of survivors before capture, during their time at Auschwitz and after their release. Almost all victims have had a lifetime of horrific, unending nightmares except those who cannot remember. Those who cannot remember, and there are few, are perhaps blessed with the body's unique defence system to block out that which is too unbearable and too painful to remember.

It has been over fifty years since the Holocaust, but it will forever remain a part of our history. Perhaps we owe it to the survivors of the Holocaust, and the families of those who did not survive, to honour their memory by a book such as this. For those of us who were born after World Ward II, the book will give the reader a deeper appreciation of the freedom we have today in North America.

Interweaving quotes from twin-survivors about their stories both during and after Auschwitz with Dr. Mengele's own biography, the authors have created a truly compelling narrative. Their central thesis -- that Mengele's obsession with twins derived from the fact that in personality he was a "twin" with angelic and sadistic sides -- is a fascinating one. Moreover, the authors are skillful in presenting anecdotes about the twin's lives that contrast with or even mirror times in Dr. Mengele's own life: i.e., the twins are desperate to leave Europe for Israel after the war; Mengele is desperate to leave Europe for South America; the twins live in broken health; Mengele becomes a hypochondriac. Thus, there is always a rich subtext to simple "stories" about the twins' lives.

Moreover, there is nothing gruesome about the book; it avoids detailed accounts of the substance of the experiments, but simply makes the point that the countless procedures performed had no medical value, and were not understood by the twins themselves.

Truly excellent and original.

A fascinating account of Nazi "scientist" and "doctor" Josef Mengele, who cheerfully "selected" thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and other people for quick death (gas chambers) or slow death (by exhaustion, malnutrition, and the filthy conditions) at Auschwitz, and who performed pseudoscientific "experiments" on many human prisoners, especially twin children. Delving into Mengele's past, as an endearing child known as "Beppo", and his life after the war (unrepetant to the end) the authors have created a fascinating portrait of this complex, twisted man. Juxtaposed with Mengele's story are the stories of the few twins who survived the experiments at Auschwitz. I found it especially poignant to see the contrast between Mengele's relatively easy life after the war--he used his family's wealth to start a successful business in South America and hobnobbed with other members of the South American Nazi "elite", and the lives of the twins after the war--most of them lost their families and lived in severe poverty, as well as being haunted throughout their lives by the horrors they suffered at Auschwitz. Highly recommended.

This book confused me at first, I am afraid. It took me a while to figure out what the authors were doing in jumping from information about Mengele at particular times in his life, to the words (spoken or written) of the children who suffered so much under his hands (also at that particular point in their lives). By the middle of the book, I figured out the author's use of comparison between Mengele and the children's groups to illustrate the great differences between the children growing up as adults and overcoming their past/dealing with it, while Mengele dwindled into the nothing that he really was in South America.

Of course, I'd heard or read some things about Mengele, but it was in the process of reading information about bioethics that I was introduced to this book, and decided I should read it for background on some work I'm doing, as per science and medicine and those least able to protect themselves against unethical practitioners of these 'arts'. The book does not dwell on the horrors that Mengele practiced on these children, and also on dwarves and giants and any other 'misfits' he was interested in. What information there is in the book (it was in story form, rather than professional paper format with numbers marking footnotes or endnotes...but there was additional information at the back of the book based on pages), indicates that Mengele was less of a scientist or a doctor, and more of a technician. His ideas for the experiments were quite often not his own, and he was extremely sloppy in keeping records that even had Germany won the war, would have provided genetic information of use to anyone else. I doubt sincerely any other scientist/physician could have copied his work and gotten the same results...and this is an absolute law in science now. Most often Mengele's work seemed to be done to satisfy his own curiosity as well as his obvious need to be in control and to hurt others.

The story of Mengele's exile is an living record of the book "The Picture of DOrian Grey." Though Mengele did not lose his good looks or his vanity, he did suffer from problems of his own making, both familial and psychological and physical. I am sure it is of no relief to those families and children who suffered at his hands that he was never brought to account (and I suspect the U.S. as well as other countries are all a bit guilty of blinding themselves), but the man did spend the rest of his life undergoing demeaning circumstances, losing his degrees, total alienation from his family, and numerous real and hypochondrial diseases/pains.

Perhaps the most outstanding thing about the book, other than the need to remind the world of the story of these children, is how many of them went on to create lives for themselves that were of great worth, in spite of never forgetting their deceased twins and families, or the horror of what was done to them. My heart broke for the girls who became mothers in their own right, only to suffer from extreme panic and anxiety due to their own past concerning their children. It was and is totally understandable that they should fear constantly, yet so many were able to overcome and be successful in their lives. A story of courage on their parts, a story to be remembered and not forgotten on our part.

For once again, the specter of eugenics and genetic manipulation is raising it's head throughout the world, with the passage of laws that allow others to make decisions for the individual concerning what constitutes a life of worth, what defines brain death, and even what type of children people should be able to bear...for the good of society of course. Those same words were spoken and used by Hitler, his cronies, and the physicians and scientists who so willingly followed his orders...all in the name of genetics and science. Those who forget (or do not read about their history), will be condemned to repeat it...

Karen Sadler,
Science Education,
University of Pittsburgh

This harrowing book traces both the life of 'the angel of death', the psycopathic monster, Dr Josef Mengele, and his victims who survived.
Mengele carried out a range of horrific experiments on a range of people, mainly twins. particularly Jewish and Gipsey children, and various others.
As Mengele's life is described, so is the life of the survivors, the horrors that they experienced at Auschwitz and how they lived in the decades afterwards.
"Most of the twins began their descent into Auschwitz by witnessing their entire families being led away from them to be killed. In their special barracks, located just yards away from the crematoriums, they observed the Nazis' extermination of Jews at close range. Twins as young as five and six years of age endured torture, daily blood tests and starvation diets, as well as facing exposure to epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis and other deadly diseases that were rampant because of unsanitary conditions. Worst of all, of course, were the Mengele's barbaric pseudoscientific experiments. But as horrific as their lives were the twins enjoyed a special privileged status, for they were regarded as "Mengele's children". And as such they were spared the random selections and march to the gas chambers that threatened every other Auschwitz inmate'.

The testimony of a handful of survivors illustrates the horror of Mengele and Auschwitz, and the scars of the experiences suffered by his victims, and how they experienced them through their lives.
In the testimony of Moshe Offer, who was twelve years old at the time: 'When they opened the doors to our cattle cars, there were lots of dead children. During the trip, some mothers couldn't bare to hear the sound of their hungry babies-and so they killed them. I remember two blond, very beautiful children in my car, whose mother had choked them to death because she could not stand to watch them suffer'.

Eva Mozes, who was nine years old at the time, recounts how, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, she and her twin sister were packed into filthy, rat infested barracks, together with hundreds of other little girls.
She remembers seeing three dead children on the ground. Later they would always be finding dead children on the floor of the latrines.
From their barracks they could see huge, smoking chimneys rising high above the camp. There were glowing flames rising above them. ' " Why are they burning so late in the evening?" I asked the other children. "The Germans are burning people they answered".
Twins Hedvah and Leah Stern. who were thirteen years old at the time, recount how Mengele tried to change the colour of their eyes:' One day we were given eye drops. Afterwards, we could not see for several days. We though the Nazis had made us blind.
We were very frightened of the experiments. They took a lot of blood from us. We fainted several times, and the SS guards were very amused.
We were not very developed. The Nazis made us remove our clothes and they took photographs of us.
The SS guards would point to us and laugh. We stood naked in front of these young Nazi thugs, shaking from cold and fear, and they laughed."
The first few chapters of the book deal with Mengele's role in Auschwitz itself, and the rest of the book relates Eichmann's experience in hiding in South America, and the way the surviving twins built up lives and families for themselves, most of them in Israel, while the nightmare of Auschwitz would scar and effect them forever.Most of the twins longed to emigrate to the Land of Israel, then the British Colony of Palestine.
They soon found that the Communist rulers of their former homes in lands like Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, were hostile to the Jewish people too, and pesecuted those who wanted to go to Israel and those who wanted to hold onto their Jewish faith, as 'Zionists'. Thus developed that form of Leftist anti-Semitism known as anti-Zionism, which was incubated by the Soviet Union, and is endemic among the international left today.
The rest of the book deals with how Mengele dwindled in exile into a neurotic and bitter non-being. The surivors describe their lives in Israel and elsewhere, after the war, their often fearful behaviour, their nightmares and their treatment, and also how they built up new lives and families, which live on in the Jewish homeland.
Mengele died after suffering a stroke and drowning in 1979, in Brazil.

I read this book while in high school. It was a chilling but memorable account from those involved with the Angel of Death as he was known. This book paints Mengle not only as a monster but as a human and shows the compassion with which he treated the beloved twins. Twins that were vital to his " scientific research". If one is easy nauseated by the Holocaust I would reccomend shying away form this work. The twins are very detailed in their accounts of their time at Auschwtiz Birkenau.

Books on the detailed experiments of Dr. Joseph Mengele are hard to find. I certainly recommend this book to any body interested in the WWII. The actions of an SS medical doctor are a true part of WWII. In this book we experience: "Science, not controlled by ethics!" The worst thing that can happen to humanity.

This is a factual, readable, and thought-provoking book about Mengele's twin experiments at Auschwitz. I was VERY frustrated that in all of the photos in the book, there was not one of Mengele himself. There was a lot of description about his appearance, but no picture of the man. Also, while the post-war stories of the twins was fascinating, the actual "experiments" performed were not described in any detail. The horror of the man and his actions is real, but why he was so horribly depraved is glossed over or never mentioned. Why did some of these twins die? What had he done to them? The author never says, probably in an effort to appeal to a wider audience. What is here is good, but there is just not enough here. Some of the photos of twins in the book are never connected to text telling their stories.

This book is a quite excellent intermingling of the story of Mengele and his Twins with quotes and comments from converstaions with some of the Twins who were his subjects for medical experiments and torture. The text of the book tells a chronological account of the life of Mengele side by side with the lives of some of his victims. The book is moving and interesting. The quotes from the surviving twins are what made the book so excellent. I read it in one sitting because I couldn't put it down and even for a minute not know what happened next.