Knowing that ordinary siblings would be taken to be murdered in the gas chambers straight away, Spiegel faked the dates of birth of brothers who were close enough in age that they could pass as twins in the hope they would be kept alive, even if still subjected to whatever medical procedures Mengele might inflict.
Gyorgy Kun was 12 years old when he and his brother Istvan arrived at Auschwitz and were turned into twins at a stroke of Spiegel’s pen. He said: “We considered him a father figure.”
Ephraim and Menashe Reichenberg also had their records faked by Spiegel and were saved from the gas chambers. After Ephraim said his brother had a good singing voice and he did not, Mengele carried out throat surgery on both of them. The damage left Ephraim reduced to using an artificial larynx. Menashe died shortly after the war of laryngeal cancer.
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Erno Spiegel's Pelikan fountain (courtesy US Holocaust Memorial Museum)[Missing Credit]
After the liberation of Auschwitz, Spiegel walked back to Hungary with the boy survivors he felt it was his duty to remain in charge of, keeping a handwritten list of all the “twins” in his shoe. The journey took more then two months.
Spiegel’s daughter Dr Judith Richter inherited the pen and has donated it to the museum. She said: “It was a tool of survival.” Her father long kept his experiences of Auschwitz secret from his family. Dr Richter learnt about Spiegel’s attempts to save lives in a 1981 magazine article.
Later a man named Peter Somogyi, who had been an 11-year-old boy at Auschwitz, managed to track down the prisoner he knew as “Spiegel Bacsi” – Uncle Spiegel in Hungarian. It was an emotional meeting after which her father opened up a little about wartime events and enjoyed visits from other survivors, says Richter, before he died in 1993. “The pen was a witness to whatever was done in Auschwitz by my father,” says Richter. “It became a replacement weapon and source of resilience.”
Spiegel’s story is told in the documentary The Last Twins, narrated by Liev Schreiber, which was released in the US earlier this year.
