There is no friendship in the camp, says Oleg Mandić, who as a boy was the last to be rescued from Auschwitz. Survival is eighty percent pure luck. A story about the banality of evil – Dr. Mengele seemed like a nice man.
"Just half a day was enough for me to lose my name and become a number. I got a red triangle and the number 189488 on my left forearm," says retired lawyer and journalist Oleg Mandić (91).
Mandić is the last inmate who was rescued from the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.
Even today, he vividly remembers the day when, with his mother Nevenka and grandmother Olga, he was deported to the camp. They were taken from their home exactly eight decades ago (May 15, 1944), and two months later, after spending time in prisons in Rijeka and Trieste, they arrived in Auschwitz on July 10 in a cattle wagon.
He was 11 years old. Their sin was that Oleg's father and grandfather were in the partisans.
"We also wanted to join the partisans, but the connection broke, and Rijeka was blocked," says Mandić, who comes from a distinguished family of intellectuals, and dedicated his life to denouncing the criminal nature of Nazi and fascist totalitarianism.
He has been lecturing in Croatia and Italy for decades, published several books, and the last one, "Life Marked by Auschwitz", which he wrote in collaboration with journalist Neven Šantić, was recently promoted at the Tito Days in Fažana.
In the first part of the book, he brings thoughts about war, the camp, anti-fascism, love, religion, about how an individual in traumatic circumstances first loses his dignity, and then, if he manages to survive, he becomes completely dehumanized.
The only rule - survival instinct
"How did I stay alive? Eighty percent was pure luck. In those eight months, we underwent some treatments, and each time we would pull out a longer, happier part of the tape," says Mandić.
"Fifteen percent is a mother's love: even though we were separated for two months, I always knew that there was a person floating in some nimbus who was thinking of me. Five percent should also be given to that kid who was already grown up."
He had no friends in the camp. "The only rule was the instinct for the survival of the species. Hope was buried long ago. There is no friendship or acquaintance there."
"The woman who was beaten to death because she fell asleep during the appeal, for which we stood in the rain for seven hours, from three in the morning until ten o'clock, each of us wanted to beat. There is no ethics in the camp. What is that? Something to eat?" , speaks without hesitation.
After he fell ill, with a temperature of 39 degrees, he ended up in the ward of the infamous doctor Jozef Mengele, where he spent five months.
He has repeatedly stated that he managed to stay alive because he was not a twin, on whom Mengele performed gruesome experiments, changing the color of their eyes by injecting chemicals, "creating" conjoined twins.
"I didn't know anything about him, nothing was known about experiments then. And the fact that the twins left and didn't come back, who cares. In a place where people are killed systematically, when someone died, they would leave him in front of the door barracks, and in the evening at eight o'clock a truck passed by that collected them and transported them to the crematorium," Mandić remembers.
"There was no reason not to trust Mengele. He was a kind man. Every day he would come shaved, ironed, always in a white coat, with polished shoes. He never raised his voice, even if he was angry. After two months I hardened because every who would address us shouted. The first person who addressed us normally was Mengele," says Mandić.
Because of this attitude, he once provoked a fierce reaction from a journalist who accused him of declaring that Mengele was a "wonderful man".
They were just doing "their job"
According to journalist Neven Šantić, Mandić's experience with Mengele confirms what the philosopher Hannah Arendt said when she wrote a book about the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, which did not bring her popularity, and in which she talks about the banality of evil.
"Why does Oleg's story confirm her thesis? Through Eichmann and what he said, Arendt developed the thesis that not all Germans were Nazi monsters, not all were madmen, they were normal people who greeted their neighbors and had respect in his community," says Šantić.
"Eichmann was just doing his job, coordinating railway transport, Mengele was just doing his research. They were wonderful, wonderful people in their treatment of others, and that only says that evil lurks in all of us, only in certain historical circumstances it is activated and you people, our dear neighbors, at some point become evil," continues this journalist.
"Some people react differently, and in such moments good comes out of them and they oppose evil. Those who propagate war are not mental patients who are in favor of hospitalization, they are around us, they are our neighbors, friends, people we know," adds Šantić and concludes:
"That's why, through Oleg's passage about Mengele, it becomes clear to us why these things appear again, thirty years ago in Croatia, two years ago in Ukraine. There is no area in the world where there is no war in one way or another, where they are not killed who think differently or are different from us."
The Red Army men liberated the camp on the night of January 26-27, 1945, but Oleg, together with his mother and grandmother, remained there for some time because it was a very severe winter.
Here's how he described the meeting with the first liberator: "That Russian, surrounded by women who hugged him, seemed to me like a Madonna, like a supernatural being. He was the first and most beautiful Russian soldier I had ever seen."
Thanks to Auschwitz, he has a beautiful life
However, Oleg Mandić did not comment on the current situation in Croatia, the formation of a government that has never been more right-wing, and certain phenomena that evoke memories of events from the past.
He also briefly answered a question from Deutsche Welle (DW) about the current conflict in the Middle East, the attack by Hamas on Israelis and then Israel's fierce response to the Palestinians.
"I don't comment on such things: Ukraine-Russia, Palestine-Jews, because it is very difficult to determine where is the truth and where is the good. I have subordinated my life to the good."
"I gave myself a task: when I started to share the testimonies from my childhood and when I realized that it was necessary, then I tried to find even the smallest bit of good in evil and on that good I tried to build reality or the future. And I fight for I don't see anything good in the Soviet-Ukrainian conflict, and even less in the Jewish-Palestinian one. The only thing that would be good is for the war to stop," says Oleg Mandić.
Until 1955, he did not have the strength to talk about the trauma from Auschwitz, thanks to which, he says, he had a beautiful life because nothing bad could happen to him after that.
And together with his friends, he knew how to push the first German tourists on the Opatija riviera into the sea. By force of will, he managed to suppress strong negative emotions. Since I was 18, I have never hated anyone, concludes Oleg Mandić.
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