The story begins in 1934, in a small, quiet village nestled in the rolling hills of Transylvania, Romania. My twin sister, Miriam, and I were the youngest of four children, born into a world that would soon vanish forever. We were only ten years old when the world turned gray. The memory of the cattle car remains vivid—the smell of cedar and fear, the crushing lack of space, and the jarring jolt as the train finally ground to a halt.
When the doors slid open, we were thrust into a landscape of chaos. People were screaming, dogs were barking, and a thick, acrid smoke hung over the platform. I remember turning around, trying to make sense of this alien environment, only to realize that my father and my two older sisters were already gone, swept away by the current of the crowd. I never saw them again.
Miriam and I clung to our mother’s coat with every ounce of strength we possessed. In the middle of that selection platform stood a man in a crisp uniform, his voice cutting through the noise like a blade. “Twins! Twins!” he shouted. He stopped in front of us, his eyes scanning our faces. He demanded to know if we were twins.
My mother, sensing a flicker of hope or perhaps a hidden danger, asked a simple, heartbreaking question: “Is that good?”
The soldier replied, “Yes.”
“Yes,” my mother whispered. “They are twins.”
In an instant, another soldier stepped forward. He pulled my mother to the right, while Miriam and I were jerked to the left. We were all crying, a chorus of despair that was lost in the wind. The last image I have of my mother is her arms stretched out toward us as she was pulled into the throng. I didn’t get to say goodbye. I didn’t understand that thirty minutes after stepping off that train, my entire family—except for Miriam—had been erased from my life.
The Science of Dehumanization
Miriam and I were now “Mengele Twins,” a term we would only truly understand in the years that followed. To the man who oversaw our barracks, we were not children; we were “guinea pigs” to be counted every morning. The experiments we endured were divided into a rigid, cruel schedule.
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we were placed in a room with dozens of other pairs of twins. For up to eight hours at a time, technicians would measure every inch of our bodies, comparing our features to one another and recording the data on clinical charts. It was a cold, sterile process that reduced our humanity to a series of numbers.
The alternate days—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays—were far more terrifying. We were taken to a blood lab where my arms would be tied to restrict circulation. They would draw large amounts of blood from my left arm and then administer at least five injections into my right. We were never told what those syringes contained.
In August, following one of these sessions, I became gravely ill. My fever skyrocketed, and my limbs became painfully swollen. I remember trembling under the heat of the sun, my skin covered in large red spots. At my next lab visit, they didn’t draw blood; they simply checked my temperature and sent me to a barrack that served as a hospital. It was a place filled with shadows—people who looked more like statues than living beings.
The next morning, the head doctor arrived with his entourage. He didn’t examine me; he simply looked at my fever chart and spoke with a terrifying detachment: “Too bad. She is so young. She has only two weeks to live.”
The Will to Survive
For the next fourteen days, I lived in a twilight state. I have only one clear, visceral memory from that time: crawling across the dirt floor of the barrack because my legs no longer had the strength to carry me. I was trying to reach a water faucet at the far end of the room. I would drift in and out of consciousness, but even in the darkness, a single thought repeated like a heartbeat: I must survive. I must survive.
Against all odds, the fever broke. I felt a surge of strength, though it took weeks for my charts to return to normal. When I finally returned to our regular barracks, I found Miriam sitting on her bed, staring into the distance with vacant eyes.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“I cannot talk about it,” she replied. “I will not talk about it.”
We honored that silence for forty years. It wasn’t until 1985 that the truth began to emerge. Miriam revealed that while I was in the hospital, she had been kept under 24-hour observation. They were waiting for me to die so they could immediately perform an autopsy on her to compare our organs. Because I lived, she lived.
However, the injections she received took a delayed toll. When she grew up and moved to Israel, her first pregnancy triggered severe kidney infections. Doctors discovered that her kidneys had never grown larger than those of a ten-year-old child. Every subsequent pregnancy was a medical crisis. By 1987, her kidneys failed completely. I donated my left kidney to her—it was a simple choice; I had two kidneys and only one sister. But the complications continued, and in 1993, Miriam passed away from bladder cancer.
A Different Kind of Power
After Miriam’s death, I was invited to speak in Boston. The organizer made a strange request: he asked if I could bring a former Nazi doctor to the event to testify. I remembered a documentary Miriam and I had filmed a year prior where a former camp doctor, Dr. Hans Münch, had spoken. I reached out to him, and while he wouldn’t travel to America, he invited me to his home in Germany.
Sitting in his living room, I found myself asking the questions I never thought I’d ask. “Did you see the gas chambers? Do you know how they operated?”
He described the nightmare he lived with every day—being stationed outside, looking through a peephole to verify that no one was left moving. He signed the death certificates, not with names, but with numbers. I asked him to come with me to the ruins of the camp in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of its liberation. I wanted him to sign a document at the site of the gas chambers, verifying exactly what had happened there. He agreed immediately.
I realized then that I wanted to thank him for his honesty. But how do you thank a person who was part of such a system? For ten months, I struggled with this question until a simple, revolutionary idea took hold: I would give him a letter of forgiveness.
The Declaration of Amnesty
The discovery was life-changing. For fifty years, I had viewed myself as a victim—someone whose life was dictated by the actions of others. In writing that letter, I realized that I possessed a power that no one could give me and no one could take away: the power to forgive.
My former English professor helped me refine the letter. She challenged me, saying, “Your problem isn’t with Dr. Münch; it’s with the man who ran the experiments.”
I wasn’t ready to forgive the “Angel of Death.” She suggested I go home and pretend he was in the room. I did just that. I sat in my living room and unleashed fifty years of anger, reading a list of twenty harsh descriptions of his character. And then, at the end, I said, “In spite of all that, I forgive you.”
A profound sense of peace washed over me. I, the former “guinea pig,” now held power over the man who had tried to destroy me.
In 1995, we stood at the ruins of the camp. Dr. Münch brought his children and grandchildren; I brought mine. I read my “Declaration of Amnesty.” I signed it, and he signed his documentation of the truth. At that moment, I felt truly free—free from the camp, free from the shadow of the experiments, and free from the weight of hatred.
The Philosophy of Self-Liberation
My decision was not met with universal approval. Many survivors denounced me then, and many do so today. They believe that to forgive is to forget or to excuse the inexcusable.
But for me, forgiveness is not about the perpetrator. It is an act of self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment. Every victim knows the feeling of hopelessness and the crushing weight of the past. We cannot change the tragedy of what happened—that is the permanent scar on history. However, we have total control over how we relate to it.
By choosing to forgive, I didn’t change what happened in 1944. I changed how I lived in 1995 and every year thereafter. I transitioned from a victim to a victor, reclaiming my life from the shadows of the past.
The story of the twins who survived the unthinkable is a testament to the fact that the human spirit, like iron, can be bent and twisted, but it can also be reforged into something new. What do you think is the most difficult aspect of finding peace after a significant hardship? Is it the act of remembering, or the challenge of letting go?