Holocaust Survivor: Sarah Shefer (nee Eckstein)

Born 1938 in Sarvar, Hungary. Deported to Auschwitz. Few memories of period together with twin sister under Mengele's supervision and medical experiments performed on them. In convent at Kattowice, Poland. From convent to Hungary with help of Jewish woman from Budapest who took them under her wing. Youth Aliya institution in Deszk. Eretz Yisrael, 1946. Youth Aliya boarding school at Kfar Batya. Marries and joins Moshav Nir Galim, 1953. Reunion with Margit Weiss, woman who took sisters from Kattowice convent.

Children as medical guinea pigs

It is hard to believe that I was part of a nightmarish scene that would not occur even to a sick imagination. In the midst of all the other horrors of Auschwitz to see children including very small children standing for hours in a Zehlappell (rollcall lineup), sometimes sitting on stools, like in kindergarten children aged six to eight. Children snatched from their mothers' arms by Mengele, who with a swing of his hand, right or left, determined whether people were to live or die. This operation, called Selektzie (selection), was carried out amid inhuman shouts and roars. Only later did we learn that Mama and all those on the left had been sent to the gas chamber.

One doctor there immediately had his eye on us, as we were twins, and were candidates for the medical-scientific experiments Mengele was conducting in order to learn how to improve the German race. The experimental barrack was called B Lager (Camp B). It was a long barrack filled with triple-tiers of bunks. Each bunk contained three children. We had to curl up for lack of space. I remember that the girl in the bunk with me and my sister got kicked whenever we tried to straighten our legs. In the middle of the barrack was a big stove. There were about 100 twins in the barrack. Our group included a family of midgets, though they were in a separate room. Among the horrible things that happened, there was the shocking case of the woman who gave birth. After the baby, a girl, was born, they experimented to see how long she would survive without food and drink, until finally, a woman doctor (a Jew) ended the baby's suffering with a lethal injection.

They tattooed numbers on our arms, and from time to time they took us to the infirmary to conduct various experiments on us. They gave us all kinds of injections, put drops in our eyes, repeatedly checked our blood. The food was very skimpy: insipid soup, bread the breadloaf was shaped like a brick and 333366 coffee. We would stand in the fenced-in yard watching skeleton-like people in striped clothing trudging around hauling the corpses on litters. The air was always filled with the stench of bodies burning in the crematorium not far from there.

Some children had their mothers nearby. The others were very jealous, because all of us desperately wanted our mothers. Today I realize how hard it must have been, in that hell, for those mothers to see what their children were undergoing.

I came down with typhus and I was put in isolation. All I did all day was crush the lice and bugs on the wall near my bunk. I recovered. One day I heard that we were free to go. We started walking. The younger children were placed in a convent at Kattowice. Out of the 2,000 walkers who had been freed, many died along the way. It was rumored that there were Jewish orphans at that convent and relatives or acquaintances were allowed to take children out of there. A certain fine woman took me and my twin sister, despite her illness. She was called "Margit Nanni." She rescued us from hell. She looked after the two of us utterly spent and completely bald as we were. From the moment we laid eyes on her we clung to her for the next few weeks till, together with her, we completed the long route back to Hungary.

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