Leo
Leo Lowy was born in 1928, in a city called Berehovo in Czechoslovakia. The Lowy family led a happy life in Berehovo - a perfect idyll with its unique fine vineyards.
The Lowy family's feelings of security collapsed, however, when Germany took over the entire country, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror.
In 1944 - Leo Lowy and his twin sister, Miriam, was 15 - more than 30 members of the Lowy family were rounded up by the Nazis. They were herded into boxcars for a three-day trip without food or water to the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
Leo and Miriam were seperated from the rest of their family and marched to a camp hospital. They were spared because of Mengele's fascination for twins. Mengele especially valued twin children for his experiments. He castrated, blinded and beheaded them. He infected them with disease. Leo Lowy later recalled:
"For about nine months, Mengele and other doctors examined my sister and me . . . they injected us with fluids and took blood samples from us. It was very scary."
When he looked for his parents and three older sisters the other prisoners just pointed to the four towering, flaming chimneys.
'Every day in the camp, away from the hospital, I saw stacks of bodies 25 feet high, bodies of adults who were 60 pounds when they died. But we survived.'
Leo Lowy and his twin sister Miriam would be the only Lowys to survive Auschwitz. Leo Lowy is retired now and active in keeping the Holocaust story alive.
|