Surviving Mengele's Auschwitz

An emotional memoir of two young men caught up in the darkest part of an already dark chapter of history

As we are witnessing the return of hostages from Gaza there is thankfully no end to the support they are getting, nor is there a lack of media attention for the post-captivity life of these traumatized people. How different it was for those few that walked out of Hitler’s concentration camps, barely alive. They had to pick up themselves and return to places where there were no families, no friends, there was nothing for them to return to. While many of these survivors went on to lead productive lives and built families again, there was a pain that could not be shared, that could not discussed, that society was not interested in and that was buried away in the deepest recesses of their souls. I have seen it firsthand with my own grandfather who survived Buchenwald, a strong man on the outside with a career and family, on the inside given to a trauma that no one recognized or dared talk about. The war, the horrors, all of it was paved over.

And so it was for Leopold ‘Leo’ Lowy and Kalman Braun, two teenage Hungarian Jews who in 1944 together with their families were ensnared in the Nazi horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Upon arrival both Kalman and Leo were as identical twins (each had a sister) confined to the pool of captives that were kept alive only to be used for medical experiments by the ‘angel of death’, Dr. Josef Mengele.

Leo’s son, Vancouver-based Richard Lowy has written a book about their journey and the memoir uses direct witness accounts to describe the details of the horrendous abuse they had to endure. It focuses in on how those that were not killed directly in the gas chambers were abused and starved on a daily basis while being forced to work inhumanely long hours. Leo and Kalman were put to work in an SS building, cleaning and serving the very men that guarded, tortured and killed the camp’s inhabitants. This role probably saved their lives as it gave them access to food leftovers and a certain level of protection from fatal abuse given their status as Mengele twins, a position that even scared some of the regular SS men.

Yet despite their work and access to things not available to other camp inmates, a fear filled cloud hung over these young men every single day. At any given moment they could be called up by Mengele for medical checkups and actual experimentation on their bodies. It was inescapable, painful, humiliating, damaging and not only a physical, but an ultimately soul destroying hell.

The book is full of detail with lots of historical notes which gives it a lot of depth. It follows the lives of the two young men before the war and also dives deep into the German institutional system that facilitated and enabled the ghastly crimes of Mengele. It also highlights the one uprising that took place in Auschwitz where a number of inmates decided that if they were to go down, they would go in a fight and they managed to disrupt the crematoria’s operations and kill a number of SS troops. Despite its fast and bloody end it marked a revival of the Jewish spirit in the darkest of places. It happened on October 7th, 1944. Yes, that very date.

Auschwitz, as a Dutch survivor relayed recently, is impossible to re-imagine even if you visit it today. What is missing is the terrible stench that permeated everything, the omnipresent smell of burned corpses, of dead bodies and the inescapable feelings of utter dread and despair. The book pulls you right into that atmosphere and it sets the reader on a steady emotional build up as you go through the pages. The reader begins to identify and live on a daily basis with Leo and Kalman, their friends and the bleak prospects they face as the story unfolds. You even get excited for them at one point in the book as they manage to find quite some food leftovers after an SS Christmas party, a necessary lifeline that they managed to share with a number of fellow camp prisoners.

After the camp’s liberation in January 1945 Leo moves to Canada where he starts a men’s fashion store and met and married Jocy with who he had three children, writer Richard being the youngest. Kalman ends up in Israel where he has a career working for the national airline El Al. That job lands him as an expat working in Seattle, next door to Leo in Vancouver, but the two men never meet. Neither of them knows that the other is still alive. And that is not for a lack of effort, Kalman searches and mobilizes archivists and survivors, but Leo is no longer using his camp nickname Lipa and so every possible search turns up nothing. A TV film produced by Richard Lowy in the early 2000s finally results in a breakthrough and the men get to meet and reunite in Vancouver in 2001, not long before Leo’s death later that year. And that is where the emotional investment of the preceding pages gets its way with you, it was hard to hold back the tears at the point where these two men finally reconnect.

The book takes you into the darkest chapter of an already incredibly dark place and puts you in front of the ‘final solution’, the endpoint of a journey that starts with casual hate. The sort of hate that we may sometimes see in everyday life but which becomes lethal once it spreads. And when the book brings you into Auschwitz you find yourself in the very place where every human emotion, including hate itself, have ceased to exist. It is a place where everything is extinguished, you are in the abyss.

The survivors experienced not just trauma, but a lot more. The guilt of having survived, the grief over lost ones, the embarrassment over having to share any of it with others, in particular in a new land. In a place where no one knows and where no one understands you. That Leo and Kalman overcame all of this and lived meaningful lives with families is a testament to their innate willpower and the scraps of food and humanity that somehow pulled them through the hell of Auschwitz and Mengele’s torture.

Their tragedy provides us with the knowledge and tools to keep telling the story and educate the next generation as the ever smaller group of Holocaust survivors is not around for much longer. You can be a part of that important process by getting the book, to read it and to share the story. I strongly recommend it.

Postscript: I put the finishing touches on this review on Friday, February 14th. The next day Richard Lowy announced that his mother Jocy, Leo’s widow had passed away at age ninety-six that very Friday. May her memory be a blessing.

At the book launch on January 27th this year, Richard Lowy walked to the very spot in the local synagogue in Vancouver where Leo used to sit and he explained about how things felt to his father having arrived in a new community as a stranger in a strange land. It was an incredibly poignant moment. (video by Daphna Kedem)

Here is the book’s website. The video of the movie “Leo’s Journey – The Story of the Mengele Twins” as narrated by Christopher Plummer can be found here.

In June 2022 I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was hard to feel the horror on a sunny day with chatty visitors and tourists walking around. But it gave me an incredible amount of background and context going into Lowy’s book, everything fell into place much more rapidly knowing how the camp was set up and organized.