DEKEL, LUCETTE MATALON LAGNADO SHEILA COHN Read Free

over the fence, where she was forced to retrieve it. Later he told me that he had survived by dreaming at night of consuming huge meals, and that this had given him the strength to face the starvation of the next day.
    Nourished on dreams!
    That he had been a child prisoner of Auschwitz I understood. That it would color his entire life I did not. But after we were married, I discovered and gradually came to share his all-consuming passion to find Mengele and bring him to justice. Auschwitz was never far beneath the surface of his thoughts. He would try to forget, but from time to time it would emerge, in episodes of unexplained rage and in periods of deep depressions that I now understand are scorched into the Auschwitz legacy of all the survivors.
    Israel became his raison d’etre. I told him it was his revenge. His life was often in danger, starting with his swimming ashore illegally from Cyprus where his ship had been detained by the British, through his dare-devil exploits, first in the Haganah and, later, in the service of the Israeli government (some of which still cannot be revealed). His entire life was shaped by forces outside of himself.
    Like so many others, Israel became his lost family. I sensed he was sometimes more at home in the memories of Auschwitz than in the real world. For the survivor, all is always Auschwitz.
    As an archivist attached to the Israeli consulate in New York, Alex began to collect information on Mengele’s every move. At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the pieces of information he shared with me on the death-camp doctor’s whereabouts. Given enough time, I was sure I could make him forget. after all, we were living in America now. We had each other. But being married to him was like being married to a secret agent. There were always secrets. His wasn’t exactly the kind of work a wife could innocently ask about at the end of the day. “What did you do today, dear?” I tried that only once!
    His compulsive search for Mengele gradually escalated into a full-scale, one-man hunt. He began to contact anyone who had ever heard of Mengele and might have knowledge of him. I remember being awakened one night by a telephone call at 3:00 A.M. from South America: Someone had phoned to report a sighting. There were many such calls.
    The papers Alex accumulated began to take on the dimensions of a personal library. Every newspaper clipping and magazine article, anything related to Mengele’s whereabouts, helped Alex put pieces of evidence together in the manner He had learned during his twenty-five years as an intelligence officer for the Israeli government. Alex soon pinpointed Mengele’s various residences and many of his movements in and out of South America. He even located a wholesale pharmacist supplying drugs to Brazil-and concocted a wild scheme to take Mengele’s medicine to him (which I vetoed as being far too dangerous). Anyone who had even the remotest connection with Mengele or with South America was a welcome visitor in our home.
    In 1976, Alex contacted the editors of Time and convinced them of the critical need to locate Mengele. They financed his research as he pursued the trail all over Europe, uncovering important new facts.
    From Vienna, where he conferred with Simon Wiesenthal, he went to Poland, where he persuaded the government to open its files on Auschwitz and Mengele’s experiments there. Elated, he brought the evidence home, where I slept innocently with Josef Mengele’s fingerprints and SS files under our bed.
    Time published these findings in September 1977, and soon after, Alex began to set down his experiences for a memoir that he hoped would someday help arouse the world’s conscience and lead to Mengele’s arrest. In the meantime, he initiated another Mengele story with Life magazine and spent hours with Dr. Robert Lilton, giving oral testimony for Dr. Lilton’s book on the Nazi doctors. And although at the beginning I had little patience with