Mengele Victim Avoids Doctors for 65 Years

Had a kidney removed without anesthesia at Auschwitz
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 11, 2009 9:26 AM CST
Mengele Victim Avoids Doctors for 65 Years
This 1944 photo provided by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum shows SS officers socializing in their retreat at Solahutte outside of Auschwitz, Poland. Josef Mengele is second from left.   (AP Photo/USHMM)

An Auschwitz survivor finally saw a doctor for the first time in 65 years after suffering a near-fatal heart attack. Upon recovery, the 85-year-old Israeli man explained why: As a young man imprisoned at the camp, notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele tied him to a table and removed his kidney without anesthesia.

"I saw the kidney pulsing in his hand and cried like a crazy man," Yitzhak Ganon tells Der Speigel. "I screamed the 'Shema Yisrael.' I begged for death, to stop the suffering." Afterward, he had to work in the camp sewing room without painkillers. From then until his recent heart attack, he stayed away from doctors and hospitals. "Whenever he was sick, even when it was really bad, he told me it was just fatigue," says his wife.
(More Josef Mengele stories.)

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