Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel320 pages
Completed 4/6/10
I have been working on an intensive research paper on medical experimentation in concentration camps during WWII and in my research came across this book. For this one paper, I've actually read 13 books, but none worth reviewing for this blog; until this one.
Dr. Josef Mengele, or "The Angel of Death" was medically fascinated with twins. This fascination led to twins' lives being spared from the gas chambers, but their fate instead led them to horrific medical experiments at the hands of Mengele. I won't go into too much detail here, but this book is not for the weak-stomached. Only 160 of 3000 twins subjected to genetic experimentation by Mengele survived through the end of the war.
Written as both a biography of Mengele interrupted by interview excerpts from some of the twin survivors, I was more intrigued by the firsthand accounts of the children - now adults. I also could not keep all of the names straight which was a shame because the epilogue updates (as of 1993) were very thorough.
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