Published: 13 April 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
“MENGELE’S DOG” WAS THE title given to jolting testimony that was found in the archive of the Ghetto Fighters’ House at Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot 17 years ago. At its centre is a Jewish boy named Otto who was forced to behave like an attack dog in Auschwitz, and in the end was saved because of his friendship with a real dog named Willy.
Tammy Bar-Joseph, who is pursuing a master’s degree in the field of cultural studies, came across this testimony during the singular research she has been conducting in the past few years on the role of dogs in the Holocaust – both as they were used against Jews and in cases where they saved Jewish lives.
“For a long time I didn’t know how to treat this story, because on the one hand it sounds made-up, exaggerated, even fantastical, but on the other hand, it sounds natural and plausible within the framework of the Holocaust horrors that happened in reality,” she says.
In the end she decided that the testimony was credible because of the source from which it arrived in the archive. The documentation came from Lena Kichler-Zilberman, a Holocaust survivor who after the war collected about 100 Jewish orphan children in Poland, took them to France and from there immigrated with them to Israel in 1949.
One of the children she took under her wing in France was named Otto (although it is not at all certain that this was his real name).
“During the selection carried out by Dr Mengele in the Auschwitz camp, Alusia, Otto’s sister, was separated from their mother. The sister clung to the mother and refused to leave her, and then dogs were sicced on her… and killed her,” the document begins.
FULL STORY The mystery of the Jewish boy who was forced to be Mengele's 'dog' (Haaretz)
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Photo: Josef Mengele with Nazi officers (AP)
