Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz - Softcover

Lucette Matalon Lagnado; Sheila Cohn Dekel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140169318 ISBN 13: 9780140169317

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1992

Synopsis

During World War II, Nazi doctor Josef Mengele subjected some 3,000 twins to medical experiments of unspeakable horror; only 160 survived. In this remarkable narrative, the life of Auschwitz's Angel of Death is told in counterpoint to the lives of the survivors, who until now have kept silent about their heinous death-camp ordeals.

About this title

About the Author:

Lucette Matalon Lagnado was born in Cairo, Egypt. She is the 2008 recipient of the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the largest cash award in the Jewish book world. As an investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, she has covered health care for a decade. She has been a finalist or received prizes from, among others, Columbia Journalism School, the University of Missouri, and the University of Southern California.

Sheila Cohn Dekel is the widow of Alex Dekel, an Auschwitz survivor.

From Library Journal:

The children of the title are the surviving twins of Auschwitz whom Mengele saved from death in order to use them for his research on "Biology As Destiny," his fixation to create a racially pure German people. But the book is more accurately the story of Mengele as culled from his writings, official documents, and fiction. The twins' stories, moving and upsetting, are framework and background to the portrait of Mengele as Victor Frankenstein. Their anguished recollections of Auschwitz and attempts to create a life after such a traumatic experience alternate in different print with the Mengele biography, right up to his recorded--but never confirmed--death in 1985. This is a well-written and well-researched book, enhanced by a scholarly list of sources on the ghoulish Mengele and his life. For a book on the Romanian Holocaust, see Siegfried Jagendorf's Jagendorf's Foundry: Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust, 1941-1944 , reviewed in this issue, p. 98.--Ed.
-Gerda Haas, Holocaust Human Rights Ctr. of Maine, Augusta
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0140169318
• ISBN 13: 9780140169317
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336