During the Second World War, around six million people (most of them Jews) were systematically killed in Germany and German-occupied territories in an event known as the Shoah (or Holocaust). Given how historically recent this was, it’s remarkable that I felt the need to write that; but, then again, as KALMAN AND LEOPOLD: Surviving Mengele’s Auschwitz points out, truths can be (and frequently are) forgotten.
Richard Lowy spent much of his youth playing guitar, mildly curious about the numbers tattooed on his father Leopold’s arm, but was warned by his mother not to question him about his time in Auschwitz. In his twenties, he learned more: his father had been a “Mengele Twin”—half of one of the many sets of twins who were experimented on by Josef Mengele, the sadistic Nazi doctor who escaped justice at the end of the Second World War and died of a heart attack in Brazil in 1979.
Following the 2001 transmission of a documentary on Leopold’s experience, Lowy was contacted by Kalman, a fellow inmate who had been protected by Leopold during his time there. KALMAN AND LEOPOLD tells the story of their time at the camp and what came after, worked up from interview transcriptions with the two men.
We do a disservice to history if we turn our heads from the horrors, and this review cannot convey them adequately. The only thing to do is to educate oneself about them, and in this the book succeeds. The inclusion of detailed plans and maps of Auschwitz at first feels out of place in a memoir, until one realizes that the horrid crimes committed there happened all of 80 years ago now and are fading from the collective consciousness across large swathes of the population. Lowy knows this, and edits the interviews sensitively, offering context and explanation where necessary. The book covers the pair’s early lives, their time at Auschwitz, and how they lived afterward.
At the book’s heart is the relationship between Kalman and Leopold at Auschwitz. Both were obvious targets for Mengele: Kalman had a twin sister, Judith; Leopold’s twin was Miriam. (Remarkably, all four survived.) The boys were 14 and 15 respectively when in May 1944 they were sent to Barrack 14, or “Mengele’s Zoo,” for experimentation. Their labor in an SS guard shack saved them, as did their closeness: they looked out for one another, took beatings from the guards when they had to, and finally separated as liberation came in January 1945. It’s touching, affecting, and worth reading.
There are two gripes. One is the formatting of the photographic sections, over which text is sometimes haphazardly arranged. It might have been better to provide photographic plates with captions at the bottom, but this rarely features. The other is that the author, faced with the need to organize the recollections of Leopold and Kalman, fits them into a chronology with dates. While some of these dates can be verified—that of Auschwitz’s liberation is known, and a few other events can be pinpointed through various means—many cannot, and Lowy does not consistently discriminate between the two. It might have been better to take Primo Levi’s approach and assign definite dates to recollections only when such dates are absolutely certain, rather than inserting this or that memory into a chronological narrative based on educated guesswork. However, it is a deficiency that does not take away from the emotional impact of an important, harrowing story.
Though there are some wrinkles in the presentation, Richard Lowy’s KALMAN AND LEOPOLD: Surviving Mengele’s AuschwitzZ contains a story about Auschwitz’s horrors that ought to be remembered and retold.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader