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As
surviving victim of The Angel Of Death, Josef Mengele, Alex Dekel later
stated: "Mengele
ran a butcher shop - major surgeries were performed without anesthesia.
Once, I witnessed a stomach operation - Mengele was removing pieces
from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another time, it was a
heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying. At 19,
in March 1943, Ernest Michel arrived in Auschwitz after five
days and four nights in cattle cars. He was born in Mannheim, Germany,
in 1923 to a Jewish family which had been living in Germany for over
300 years. He was arrested on September 3, 1939, three days after the
outbreak of World War II, and spent the next five-and-one-half years
in slave labor and concentration camps. "One
day in the summer of 1944 we took eight women, mostly young and all
healthy, into the room where the experiments would take place. I saw
Mengele standing there in his uniform, surrounded by three or four
others. As we brought in each girl, an officer would strap her down.
After a while the screaming inside stopped. When we took them out two
of the eight were dead, five were in a coma, one was still strapped to
the cot. Mengele was standing there, discussing it very casually. The
only word I could hear was 'experiment'." Ernest
Michel's parents, grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins were all
murdered by the Nazis, gassed in Auschwitz. He survived and arrived in
the United States in 1946. He was active in the survivor community for
many years and served as Chairman of the World Gathering of Holocaust
Survivors in Israel in 1981.
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