“Schnell, Schnell, Schnell!”

In March 1944, Alexander and Jaffa Mozes, along with their four daughters and dozens of other Jews, were crammed into a train that normally carried livestock. After four days without any food or water, they found themselves on the selection platform in Auschwitzk-Birkenau, amongst the shouts of German soldiers repeating: “Schnell, schnell, schnell!”

Jaffa squeezed the twins’ hands vigorously. In the overwhelming chaos, their father and two sisters had been separated from them. A German officer asked the mom if the girls were twins. “Is this good or is this bad?” Jaffa inquired after having confirmed that Eva and Miriam were born on the same day.

The twins were violently pulled away from their mother. In a matter of minutes, they had become orphans. Their new family became 30 sets of twins, ranging between the ages of 2 to16.

“We were taken into a large building where they shaved our hair and undressed us. Two soldiers held me down so that I could get tattooed on my left arm. I became A-7063 and Miriam became A-7064. Then we were brought into a horse’s stable, which was located on the outskirts of the concentration camp. This became our barrack. I have never seen a place of such misery and cruelty,” recounts Eva.

Their barrack was full of rats and lice. On their first night in Auschwitz, Eva woke up screaming: “There are mice, there are mice everywhere!” An older girl immediately shut her down: “Get used to it! Yes, they are everywhere, but they aren’t mice, they are rats!”

When they went to use the bathroom for the first time, they tripped over the dead bodies of two children. They were in hell.

The Blood Laboratory

The twins were awakened every morning at 5 am for roll call. The first order of business was a morning inspection conducted by the diabolical Mengele. He would slowly stroll by each of them.

Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the twins were kept naked in a room for up to eight hours at a time, in order to examine and measure different parts of their body. “It was absolutely humiliating,” remembers Eva. Tuesday and Thursday, they spent the day at the blood laboratory.

“They tied both our arms to limit our blood circulation. They would draw a ton of blood from our left arm and then give us five injections in our right arm. We didn’t know what they were injecting into us. It was rumored that they were injecting us with microbes, illnesses or medication.”

After a couple visits to the blood lab, Eva began feeling very sick with a high fever. She tried to hide her weakness because no child ever returned from the hospital. At a morning inspection, Mengele identified red spots all over her body and sent her to the hospital.

“The people seemed to be more dead than alive. Mengele, accompanied by four other doctors, wanted to know how high my fever was. Then, he started laughing sarcastically and said: What a shame, she has just a couple of weeks to live! I refused to accept his verdict. I wanted to prove to him wrong. I wanted to see my sister again.”

The only memory I have of the next 14 days is crawling across the barrack floor to get water. People were dying around me. I kept my mind focused on an image of Miriam and getting out of that hell. A month later, after my fever subsided, I saw my sister again. She looked like a zombie. I asked her what had happened in my absence and she told me that she could not or would never tell me about it,” recounted Eva.

“Forty years later we discovered, in the Auschwitz Museum, that if I had died, Miriam would’ve been taken to the laboratory and killed with an injection to the heart. Then, they would’ve performed a comparative autopsy.”

According to Eva, 1,500 pairs of twins were involved in Mengele’s experiments. Only 250 survived.

After their release on January 27, 1945, Miriam and Eva spent nine months in a refugee camp in Katowice, Poland. Here, they reunited with Rosalia Csengeri, a friend of their mother, whose twins were also victims of Mengele’s experiments.

Rosalia helped the two girls return to Romania in October 1945. In their family home, all that was left were three pictures in broken frames lying on the floor. This was all they had of their family’s past.