Gyorgy Kun, survivor of Auschwitz twin experiments, dies at 93

Boston Globe

18-03-2025

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That unwitting deception saved the lives of her sons. While she was sent to the gas chamber, they went to the barracks that housed twins used by Mengele for medical experiments. Mr. Kun, who died Feb. 5 in Budapest at 93, was among the few remaining survivors of that infamous chapter of the Holocaust.
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'My last memory of my mother is that she is holding my hand and we are separated,' Mr. Kun recalled, according to an account of his life written by his daughter, Andrea Szonyi, and published on the website of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. 'We were simply torn apart: we, one way and she, the other. I had that picture with me a long time, and I know my brother did, too.'
Mr. Kun arrived at Auschwitz, the Nazi killing center in occupied Poland, at the outset of the camp's deadliest period. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944 — a span of eight weeks — German and Hungarian officials deported approximately 420,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz. Seventy-five percent were gassed upon arrival, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
A total of 6 million Jews, including more than 560,000 Jews from Hungary, were murdered in the Holocaust.
Few Nazi officials loom larger in the memory of the Holocaust than Mengele, who died a fugitive in Brazil in 1979. A highly trained researcher with a doctorate in anthropology as well as a medical degree, he had risen to prominence in Nazi Germany and was 32 when he arrived at Auschwitz.
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Like other Nazi physicians and medical researchers, Mengele adhered to pseudoscientific theories of Aryan racial superiority and exploited concentration camp inmates, who represented ethnicities and nationalities from across Europe, in often sadistic medical experiments.
At Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp in Germany, inmates were subjected to high-altitude conditions in research designed to benefit German military pilots. In other experiments, prisoners were infected with diseases or forced to submit to surgeries, including sterilization. Many inmates were permanently disfigured by the experiments, if they survived. The bodies of the dead were dissected, and their organs and tissues sent to Germany.
Mengele selected hundreds of sets of twins for genetic research at Auschwitz. The precise nature of his work involving twins is not fully established, in part because few victims survived and in part because little documentary evidence of that activity remains, said David Marwell, author of the book 'Mengele: Unmasking the 'Angel of Death'' (2020).
Marwell worked on the Mengele case at the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations before the corpse of the Nazi doctor was positively identified in 1985. He said that the Kun brothers probably endured protocols designed to determine if they were identical or fraternal twins, a key distinction in genetic research.
According to his daughter, Mr. Kun recalled being subjected to blood tests, injections, X-rays, measurements of his body and analyses of his hair. Mengele's twins — many of whom, like Mr. Kun and his brother, were children — underwent such procedures after being separated from their parents and in an environment of terror.
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Mr. Kun spoke relatively little of his experience at Auschwitz. But he remembered with affection a fellow prisoner named Erno Spiegel, a Hungarian twin in his late 20s who was tasked with overseeing the children in the twins barracks. Like Mr. Kun's mother, Spiegel told a lie that saved his life at Auschwitz.
When Mr. Kun and his brother reported for registration after their selection, they were unaware that they had been mistaken for twins and provided their accurate dates of birth. Recognizing that they would be put to death if the Nazi physicians learned they were not twins, Spiegel falsified their birth dates.
'I decided to take a chance, and put down false information,' Spiegel recounted years later in testimony recorded in the book 'Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz' (1991) by Lucette Matalon Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel. 'I 'made' them twins.'
Gyorgy Kuhn — as an adult he dropped the H to Hungarianize his surname — was born on Jan. 23, 1932, in Vallaj, a village in northeastern Hungary. Within his family, he was known as Gyuri. His brother, called Pista, was born Dec. 17, 1932. Their father was an agricultural professional and managed farms, while their mother tended to the home.
When Gyuri was young, the family moved west across Hungary to a home outside Szekesfehervar, where his father had found work. The two brothers attended a Jewish school, living with the rabbi to avoid the commute to and from town. In testimony to the Shoah Foundation, Mr. Kun recalled the period as 'the good life.'
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Beginning in the late 1930s, Hungarian Jews suffered increasing persecution under the regime of Admiral Miklos Horthy. Mr. Kun was barred from attending the high school of his choice, and bullying classmates insulted him with antisemitic taunts.
Hungary joined the Axis alliance in 1940 but refused Nazi demands for the deportation of the country's Jews — at the time the largest Jewish community still alive in Europe, according to the Holocaust museum.
Mass deportations began after Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. Mr. Kun recalled that he and his family were moved first to a ghetto and then to a brick factory that served as a way station en route to Auschwitz.
'My parents couldn't imagine where we would end up, so my mother kept repeating that we should always stay together,' he said. 'No matter what, the family must not be torn apart.'
Upon their arrival at Auschwitz, Mr. Kun's father was separated from the rest of the family and sent to work. He was later transferred to Dachau. Mr. Kun's grandparents and many other members of his extended family perished along with his mother in the Holocaust.
Mr. Kun described Spiegel as serving for him and his brother as their 'father in Auschwitz.' It was Spiegel, he said, who helped them make their way home to Hungary after the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945.
Mr. Kun stayed for a period with his brother in a Zionist children's home in Budapest before returning to Szekesfehervar to live with their father, who had remarried. Gyuri began a factory career, working first as a mechanical technician and later in sales. His daughter said he suffered from depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as an abiding trepidation before doctors, as a result of his experience in the Holocaust
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'Very often, I underrate myself,' Mr. Kun said. 'There is a certain repression, almost fear, in me that I believe comes from there.'
Mr. Kun's brother studied architecture and moved to the United States following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. He settled in Oklahoma City and died of an infection shortly before his 30th birthday, a loss so painful to Mr. Kun that he rarely if ever spoke about it.
Besides his daughter, a Holocaust educator in Hungary, Mr. Kun's survivors include his wife of 64 years, the former Agnes Boskovitz, and two grandchildren. Mr. Kun's daughter confirmed his death, at a hospital, and said she did not know the cause.
Mr. Kun had no contact after the war with Spiegel, who moved to Israel and died in 1993. He did, however, come to know Spiegel's daughter, Judith Richter, who is at work on a documentary film about her father, and who visited Mr. Kun in Budapest several years ago.
It was 'very strange,' she said in an interview, 'to go there to meet someone I didn't know' and to feel 'so welcome.'
'Nothing happens by accident; our lives are interwoven within a mosaic-like, larger context,' Mr. Kun's daughter reflected in an article published by the Shoah Foundation.
She continued: 'I owe something to Erno Spiegel. I owe him my father's life, my own life, and the lives of my children.'