Holocaust survivor sisters tell how their cousin was led
to his death on his seventh birthday after Josef Mengele tricked him
into 'volunteering' for a monstrous experiment by saying he would be
taken to visit his mother
Daily Mail
July 3, 2020
Holocaust survivors have recalled how Nazi officers would select which
children to experiment on by asking which one of them wanted to visit
their mothers and choosing whoever stepped forward.
Italian-born Andrea and
Tatiana Bucci were deported with their family in 1944, they were
incarcerated Risiera di San Sabba, an Italian transit camp for Jews
before being sent Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Appearing in Netflix
documentary 'Anne Frank - Parallel Stories', the sisters told how after
being mistakenly labelled as triplets with their cousin Sergio, they
were approached by a man who they thought was Josef Mengele, also known
as 'Dr Death'.
Mengele was responsible
for the camp's children, often carrying out experiments on twins, and
Andrea told how he would trick children into volunteering to take part
in trials on 'tuberculosis and lymph glands'.
She told: 'I remember that this one person came, he might have been Menegle and he asked us if we wanted to go see mother.
'A
hack doctor from Neuengamme, who had carried out some experiments on
tuberculosis and lymph glands on some adults, thought to experiment on
children too and asked Mengele for these children.'
The pair
had been warned by a camp guardian who had grown fond of them not to
step forward if he asked, however their cousin Sergio did not listen to
their warning.
Andrea went on:
'We warned Sergio not to step forward, but he did not listen to us and
ten males and ten females stepped forward.'
Tatiana Bucci went on to express the
'indescribable burden on her heart' she feels knowing their cousin went
to his death on his seventh birthday, while he believed he would be
visiting his mother.
She said: 'To
think that he was left believing that he was going to met his mum and
instead, going to meet his death on his seventh birthday, still feels
like such a burden on my heart it's indescribable.'
'Because in the camps and among the
barracks, there are heaps of corpses. To see these corpses that they
tried to push inside this barrack had become normal to us.'
The
documentary sees the story of Anne Frank, retold alongside those of
five Holocaust survivors, in a poignant documentary narrated by Oscar
winner Helen Mirren.
On August 4,
1944, Anne Frank and her family were betrayed, arrested by the Gestapo,
taken from the Amsterdam annexe where they had hidden for two years and
despatched to concentration camps.
The
poignant diary Anne had been keeping for the two years, she and her
family endured in the annexe, and had nicknamed Kitty, stopped that day.
Anne
was just 15-years-old at the time of her death, and the end of the war
her father Otto, the sole survivor of the concentration camps, returned
home to Amsterdam and published her famous diary.
Another
survivor, Arianna Szorenyi who was deported from Italy in 1944 before
being deported to Auschwitz and then Bergen Belson, told of her meeting
with one of the most notorious female SS guards in history.
Irma
Grese was nicknamed the 'Hyena of Auschwitz' before becoming head of
Bergen-Belsen's women section, and at 22 she was the youngest woman to
be sentenced to death for war crimes after the camps were liberated.
The
survivor told that while in the camp, she had noticed the guard, who
she says other officers were 'in love with' behind her, and didn't
realise until she had turned around that she had her gun pointed at the
back of her head.
She recalled: 'I sort of ran for a short distance and then, almost in the front of my block I slowed down.
'Because
I saw coming towards me maybe three of four well dressed Nazi’s Irma
Grees was behind me, they were all In love with her.
'Like
children I suddenly turned around because I was curious. and Irma Grese
had her gun pointed at me, that was the only time I realised I could
die.'
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