Tag: Mengele

Recollecting Auschwitz

Recollections of day-to-day details at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by survivor Kalman Bar-on are being made public for the first time in Canada at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day presentation in Vancouver on Jan. 26 at the Rothstein Theatre.

The Story of Kalman & Leopold features previously unseen testimony, providing a unique glimpse at the Nazi atrocities committed at the extermination camp, given from the vantage point of a Jewish witness posted in a camp guard shack. The presentation takes place on the eve of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The testimony of “Mengele twin” Kalman Bar-on will be revealed by Richard K. Lowy, a Jewish Canadian and the son of Holocaust survivor Leopold Lowy – another twin who was subjected to SS doctor Josef Mengele’s gruesome human experiments at Birkenau’s hospital camp during the Holocaust.

Richard Lowy was on a decade-long mission to preserve his father’s recollections as Canada’s last surviving “Mengele twin” when his efforts yielded an unforeseen link to Bar-on in Israel.

“I will try to paint this map of fear,” begins Bar-on’s testimony, “pointing out the difference between fear from the paws and boot of SS Guard Sgt. Fritsche Fritz, the palpable fear for our lives when witnessing a delivery of the next batch of walking skeletons to the crematorium, the ice-cold grab in my chest when I am lying on the stone table during the periodic medical checks of Mengele, and the ever-present knowledge that no one, but no one, will survive and emerge from Birkenau.”

“We produced Leo’s Journey (leosjourney.ca) in 2000,” writes Lowy. “The documentary was presented in Canada, part of Europe and in Israel.”

When the film played on the National Geographic Channel in Israel on Oct. 31, 2001, an astonishing thing happened, Lowy said. “Precisely 21 minutes and 17 seconds into the film, a picture of my father, Leo Lowy, was shown as a young boy. [A] man dropped his dinner and started yelling at the screen: ‘It’s my Lippa!’ Kalman Bar-On had been looking for his ‘Lippa’ for 56 years. Lippa was his hero in Auschwitz-Birkenau and saved Kalman from beating in the hospital camp’s SS guard shack.”

For (free) tickets to the Jan. 26 presentation, which starts at 6:30 p.m., visit eventbrite.com.

Creepy, well-crafted thriller

In her film The German Doctor, Lucia Puenzo tries to capture Josef Mengele’s “very sociopathic, complex personality.” (photo from Vancouver Jewish Film Festival)

As a high school student in the 1990s, Lucia Puenzo was fascinated and mystified by an open secret: hundreds of Nazi war criminals found refuge in her native Argentina.

“I was intrigued that so many families knew what was going on because they had a German man on their block or somewhere in their neighborhood,” recalled the acclaimed novelist and filmmaker. “Maybe they didn’t know so much in the ’60s and ’70s but, by the ’80s or ’90s, everybody knew. How could they not open their mouths and say what happened? It had a lot of echoes of our military coup d’etat, where so many Argentine families didn’t speak out.”

In her 2011 novel Wakolda, Puenzo explored the devious machinations of a German doctor in the Patagonian town of Bariloche circa 1960 who befriends a young girl. The erstwhile physician injects her with growth hormones before turning his attention to her pregnant mother, distracting the suspicious father with a plan to mass-market his handmade dolls.

Puenzo adapted the novel for the screen, shifting the point of view from the doctor to the child. The German Doctor, which swept Argentina’s major film awards and was the country’s official submission for last year’s Oscar for best foreign language film, is a creepy, precisely crafted thriller made more unsettling by its restraint. It screens Nov. 12 in the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.

At 37, Puenzo has already published five widely translated novels and directed three singular films, including XXY, her prize-winning tale of an intersex teenager. Smart and fearless, she is attracted to subjects that others find off-limits or taboo – like the Nazi presence in Argentina.

“For me, the big mystery has always been why this subject, that could be a hundred films and a hundred novels, has never been taken to film before,” she explained in a long-distance phone interview. “We have maybe a few excellent documentaries on the subject but not one fiction film, and maybe we have five or six novels, and that’s all speaking about the subject.”

The German Doctor did solid box office in Argentina, which Puenzo sees as confirmation of pent-up interest. The film has been released in dozens of countries, including several European nations.

The film succinctly illustrates how a cautious physician who adults would view with suspicion, let’s call him Josef Mengele, could win a child’s trust.

“In the camps, there were so many horrible testimonies of how kids would call him Uncle Mengele. He would have sweets to give to the children and then he would take them to his experiments,” Puenzo said.

The German Doctor captures that deviousness and single-mindedness, while persuasively depicting the polite veneer Mengele devised to mask his lunacy and deceive people.

“After the war, after the concentration camps, he disguised himself as this very civilized, seductive, enchanting man that lived for decades in three countries of Latin America without anybody suspecting who he was,” Puenzo said. “I think that’s how you have to portray this very sociopathic, complex personality who disguised himself. He was not the stereotype of the bad guy whom you could see coming.”

Puenzo comes across as earnest and serious but, befitting someone with a master’s degree in literature and critical theory, she recognizes the relationship between pop culture and popular perceptions of history.

“I remember films like The Boys of Brazil,” she said. “I loved it in a way, it’s such a strange film, but at the same time it’s a stereotype of Mengele. I think to honor these most horrific monsters, you really have to show them in all their complexity. They were much more dangerous than we think.”

The German Doctor is in Spanish and German with English subtitles; it is rated PG-13 for thematic material and brief nudity. For the full schedule of this year’s VJFF, which started Nov. 6, visit vjff.org.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.