Lidia Maksymowicz was 3 years old when she and her family arrived at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in December 1943, deported by Nazi Germany from the Minsk area in Belarus. It was late at night. The ramp was brightly lit. SS troops were shouting. Guard dogs were barking. Families were violently torn apart. Lidia was separated from her mother and sent to the children's barracks, a wooden building with long rows of bunks. The facilities teemed with vermin, there was hay instead of mattresses, and the blankets were stiff with grime. The children suffered from hunger and cold. And they feared visits by the doctor Josef Mengele.
"I can't remember his face, just his polished boots," Maksymowicz said. "When I heard his footsteps, I crawled under the pallet, ducked and closed my eyes. I thought he would not find me."
Mengele — the eldest son of Karl and Walburga Mengele, who ran a farm machinery company in the town of Günzburg in the southern German state of Bavaria — studied medicine and anthropology. After receiving two doctorates, he turned to research at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene in Frankfurt.
