Viktor Frankl made the point that there are really only two races in the world, the decent people and the indecent people. In the Lager, it was almost impossible to be wholly decent. This is a story of a truly a decent man.
The image above is a staged shot taken by the Russians several days after they arrived at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. The two little girls we see, after the nurse carrying a child, are Eva and Miriam Kor. Twins, they were part of Mengele's group of special twins. On the left is Eva Kor, a great woman, who died just a few months ago. A few days before this picture was taken, a party of 39 boys, mainly twins, had set off from the camp to walk home to Hungary. They were led by a 30 year old twin, Zvi Spiegel.
The girls hardly knew each other but the boys formed lifetime friendships. Housed in Hut 14 in BfII, the "hospital area of the camp just down from Kanada and Krema IV and V, they lived in a different world from any other group of prisoners. In Hut 14, food had to be shared, comfort and clothes shared.Friendships were encouraged. Hut 14 was an island of community in the shark tank of the Lager. All of this was the work of one man.
Zvi Spiegel, "Spiegel Bacsi,''or Uncle Spiegel also known as Zwillingsvater, or 'twins father' is I think one of the few who clearly deserve the label of a "decent man". This is his story.
He and his twin sister, Magda, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944 from their hometown Munkács in Sub-Carpathian Rus which was under Hungarian rule at the time. Upon arrival, when Spiegel, aged 29, heard the guards shouting Zwillinge, Zwillinge! (twins, twins), he immediately identified himself as a twin. At that very moment Mengele arrived and saw Spiegel—who had formerly been an officer in the Czechoslovakian army—standing at attention like a soldier. Mengele immediately approached him, asked him about his background and appointed him supervisor of the younger twins in the Birkenau hospital sub-camp, known as Lager BIIf—Häftlingskrankenbau.
From that point, the course of Spiegel’s life changed forever. Beginning as a minor functionary in the camp, he emerged as the guardian of a group of twin boys. His position required him to escort the twins and bring them to the designated place in which the experiments were being conducted, and there to serve as Mengele’s translator. As time went on, Spiegel took on a much more formative role in the camp. He forged the twins into a unified entity, attended to their needs, educated them, comforted them and gave them hope, and on several occasions risked his own life to save theirs. Even though he did not believe that they would live to see liberation, in order to give the twins a spark of hope he promised to take them home one day. (The History of Zvi Spiegel: The Experience of Mengele Twins and Their Protector During the Holocaust and its Aftermath Yoav Heller PhD Candidate 2013 Department of History Royal Holloway, University of London)
This picture was taken by Allied reconnaissance in September of 1944 as the Hungarian Aktion reached its peak, killing nearly 400,000 people - about 6,000 a day. The picture shows 3 transports. Look at the top left above Krema II (Krema I was in Auschwitz main camp) and you see a plume of smoke. The ovens had a design capacity of a bit more than 1,000 in a 24 hour period. In the Hungarian Aktion, the ovens could not keep up and many bodies were burned on a huge pyre outside. The "hospital" where Spiegel's boys lived, was the area I have marked. One of these huts was Hut 14. It is just back from Kanada, where all the possessions were sorted and stored for shipment back to the Reich. To the right of Kanada are Kremas IV and V. Beyond Kanada is "The Sauna" where prisoners who were selected to work were processed.
Each block of huts is closed off with wire and gates. If you were found trying to get from one block to another you were shot. I tell you this for a reason.
Mengele had a rival, a Dr Thilo. Mengele's wife, Irene, had come to visit him and had fallen critically ill. For a while it seemed that she might die. Mengele put all his attention towards her care. This gave Thilo his chance. He went into Hut 14 in the middle of the night and set up a selection. Tying a string between two bunks, all those who were too small to pass beneath the string, he selected for gassing the next day. This included all the male dwarves of the Ovitz family who also lived in Hut 14. Spiegel could not directly confront Thilo. After all he was himself a Jew and a prisoner. Instead, he climbed out of a window and ran outside for help, calling to a guard on one of the towers. A guard whose standing orders were to shoot a prisoner on site at night. Spiegel and the guard knew each other and the guard called Mengele who came immediately. Mengele cancelled the selection and had Thilo removed from the camp. Such was Mengele's power in the hierarchy.
Mengele's protection was real and also paradoxical. Though he was only a Captain, he had been a serving officer in the Waffen SS and had been awarded the Iron Cross First Class, equivalent to the MC. He was also the most highly qualified of all the doctors on the SS staff and had a grant from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for his research into twins. No one thought of him as a mad scientist but as the only real researcher on staff. He had what the Germans called then, "Vitamin B", or massive support from above that not only included Professor Verschuer at KWI but also Himmler who was fascinated by this research. This and his personal charisma, meant that the senior officers left him alone and also that the NCO's and men on staff were as frightened by him as the prisoners were.
According to Dr. Nyiszli, they trembled at the mention of Mengele’s name, as he discovered when he was challenged by an SS soldier for being in F camp, away from his zone: I answered him in a quiet voice: “I am here because Dr. Mengele sent me.” The name “Mengele” worked like magic. My noncom grew tame in less time than it takes to tell. In an almost fawning manner he asked me how long I intended to stay inside the camp.
The paradox was that if Mengele favoured you, then you had "vitamin B" in the camp. Spiegel, the Ovitz family, the prisoner doctors who worked for him such as Nyiszli and all the twins in his program had his protection. Dr Thile, had no authority to do what he did and was immediately reassigned to another camp. he left within a day. Mengele asserted his authority to the prisoners and to his superiors.
Mengele had been supportive of Spiegel before but now ensured that Hut 14 would be a sanctuary. Spiegel's sister Magda was taken out of the camp population and got a job as Mengele's office cleaner. An inside job with light duties and access to food, clothes and warmth.
But all of this changed on January 17th 1945 when Mengele left the camp forever. Without his protection, Hut 14 was now seriously at risk. Most of the remaining prisoners, including Magda and Dr Nyiszli, were marched out of the camp on a death march back to Germany. Somehow, Spiegel prevented HUT 14 from joining this. The SS blew up Krema V and set Kanada afire. All assumed that the SS would finish the clean up job by killing all the remaining prisoners. Instead they were marched to the old Auschwitz that now had no power and were dumped there.
A day later, the Russians arrived.
Imagine that you are a boy of say 8 years. You are now "free" but all your family is dead and your community at home is gone. What do you do? How are you going to feed yourself? Where will you go? How will you go anywhere? These terrible feelings of emptiness filled all the prisoners. Until then, everyone knew the rules. They were the camp rules. Now there were no rules and nothing could be predicted.
Full of doubt about whether he could or should do this, Spiegel decides to take the boys of Hut 14 home with him to Hungary. They set off in the snow and the cold of January on a three day, 60 KM, trek to Krakow where they will get passes to go eventually to the Hungarian border (Now part of Romania). The map below shows you his route of over 600 KM. Along the way, Spiegel loses one boy in a traffic accident.
Eventually Spiegel finds Magda who survived the awful march. His home town, Munkacs, once mainly Jewish, has hardly any Jewish survivors. He moves to Israel where his role as a Kapo puts him under suspicion. Also, like many genuinely good people, he does not think that he has done anything special. It takes decades for people to understand what he did.
In 1985, there was a conference of about 100 surviving twins in Jerusalem. Here is a clip from the New York Times that covered this meeting.
After his story was told, the inquiry board asked all those in the audience that he had taken care of to stand up. One by one various sets of male twins rose, many of them now balding or grey, to hail the man they called in Hungarian ''Spiegel Bacsi,'' or Uncle Spiegel. The audience broke into spontaneous applause.
Zvi Spiegel a "decent man" 1915 - 1993.
