One of the last Hungarian survivors of ‘Angel of Death’ Dr. Josef Mengele’s twin experiments, György Kun, died aged 93 on February 5, it was revealed this week.
According to his testimonies, including one with the USC Shoa Foundation, Kun and his brother Istvan survived Auschwitz in part due to the fact that Dr. Mengele believed them to be twins and thus spared them from the gas chambers.
György and Istvan were, in fact, not twins. However, both were born in 1932. György Kun was born on January 23 1932 in Vállaj, Hungary to Márton and Piroska Kuhn. Istvan was born 11 months later.
The Kun family was evicted from their home in 1944 and sent to a nearby ghetto in Székesfehérvár. In May of the same year, the family was loaded on a train headed to Auschwitz.
On arrival, the two boys and their mother were separated from the father, Kun explained in a testimony to his daughter, Andrea Szonyi, in 1999. He then found himself face to face with the infamous Dr. Mengele.
“He asked my mother one word,” Gyuri recalled in his testimony, “‘Zwillinge [Twins]?’ My mother did not speak German, but instinctively she replied, ‘Ja.’”
Piroska was then separated from them and was murdered.
The truth about the brothers not being twins came to light shortly after, during inmate registration when they provided their dates of birth. However, the inmate in charge of registering them – Ernő (Zvi) Spiegel – did not report them and instead falsified Istvan’s birthday to match György’s. The two then received their tattoos: A-14321 and A-14322, respectively.
In his testimony, Kun said that he never forgot about Spiegel, who, despite being trusted by Dr. Mengele, risked his life to save others. Spiegel went a step further for the ‘twins’; after the camp was liberated, he led them back to their home, and also appointed older boys to look after them when they parted ways.
Spiegel’s final words to the boys were, “Maybe, one day, life would be joyful again.”
Kun told his daughter that after surviving Auschwitz, they reunited with their father.
Post-Holocaust life
Istvan left Hungary for the US during the 1956 revolution but later became ill and died at the age of 30.
György remained in Hungary, where he married and had a daughter. However, he reported that his life was plagued by posttraumatic stress disorder stemming from the Holocaust.
His daughter, Andrea Szonyi, worked at the USC Shoah Foundation and authored a story in the series “Voices from the Archive” about her father, published in 2014.
In an extract from the book, Szonyi recalls finding Ernő Spiegel’s own testimony in the book Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel.
“One day, I was filling out forms for a new pair of twins and noticed the date of birth one child had given me was different from the birth date of his sibling,” Spiegel recalled. “It was obvious they were not really twins. But I knew that if anyone learned this, the boys would immediately be put to death. And so I decided to take a chance and put down false information. I ‘made’ them twins. I knew if Mengele learned of what I had done, he would kill both me and the children on the spot.”
Szonyi also wrote about her decision to work in Holocaust education. “I could be teaching English, or running a school, or doing any number of things to make a difference instead of working in Holocaust education,” she said. “But now I understand that nothing happens by accident; our lives are interwoven within a mosaic-like, larger context. My father’s story is part of Ernő Spiegel’s story; their stories are part of their children’s: Judith and Israel Spiegel’s, and part of mine. There’s more to be found in this larger story than mere poetry; for me, there is also purpose.
Mengele’s twin experiments
Nothing is known about what experiments the Kun brothers endured, however, there are testimonies from other twins who survived Dr. Mengele.
Prof Paul Weindling of Oxford Brookes University told the BBC that he found a record of a prison doctor who reported that Mengele experimented on 732 pairs of twins, a group the Nazi doctor was particularly interested in, and used as ‘guinea pigs’ for his research.
A survivor of the experiments, Jona Laks, who founded and serves as chairwoman of the Organization of the Mengele Twins, told the BBC that Mengele removed organs from people without anaesthetic, and if one twin died the other would be murdered.
Laks added that when she first entered Mengele’s laboratory, she saw a whole wall of human eyes. “A wall of blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes. These eyes they were staring at me like a collection of butterflies and I fell down on the floor.”
The first experiment Mengele carried out on her involved injections into her back, which she believes were intended to change her eye color.
In another experiment, she and her twin, as well as 100 other twins, were injected with a bacteria that causes Noma disease, which resulted in some dying.
Dr. Erwin W. Rugendorff, in a research piece, quoted a witness who said Josef Mengele ripped an infant from its mother’s womb, then threw it into an oven because it wasn’t a twin as he had hoped.
Rugendorff added that twins were subject to weekly examinations and measurements of their physical attributes and sometimes had their limbs amputated.
After injecting one twin with a disease, Mengele would then transfuse their blood into the other.
Miklós Nyiszli, a prisoner doctor at Auschwitz, testified to seeing Mengele personally killed fourteen twins in one night through a chloroform injection to the heart.
Another witness, Vera Alexander, described how Mengele sewed two Gypsy twins together back-to-back in an attempt to create conjoined twins, Rugendorff added.
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