HEART specialists have saved the life of an Israeli man who refused to visit a doctor for 64 years - and learnt the terrible secret of his mistrust of the medical profession. When Yitzchak Ganon, 85, awoke from the anaesthetic at a hospital near Tel Aviv, he was informed he had only one kidney.

''I know,'' he said. ''The last time I saw the other one, it was pulsating in the hand of a man called Josef Mengele. He was a doctor too.''

Mr Ganon revealed to his family why he had never visited a doctor since he was freed from the Auschwitz death camp in January 1945.

A Greek Jew, he was deported along with his mother, father and five brothers and sisters to Auschwitz in 1944. His father died en route, and his mother and siblings were gassed within hours of their arrival. But he was chosen by Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor who met every transport that arrived in search of human guinea pigs.

Mengele, known to his victims as the Angel of Death, had him strapped to an operating table.