Identical twin sisters, Annetta Able and Stephanie Heller, survived the horrors of Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Their story has been featured in a new book called “The Twin Children of The Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive.” The book documents the experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele, a Nazi physician known as the “Angel of Death,” who treated the twins as human guinea pigs.
Able and Heller were taken from their home in Prague in 1942, and a year later, they were sent to Auschwitz. There, they found themselves in barracks with other twins, who were also selected for Mengele’s experiments. Mengele had planned to impregnate each of them with identical twin brothers and then kill them during their pregnancy.
The sisters did not know about Mengele’s plan until after they were liberated from Auschwitz. They learned that one of the other sets of twins died after the experimentation. Able’s daughter, Daphna, said her mother and aunt were horrified at the news.
The book’s author, Nancy Segal, said that Mengele experimented on around 1,500 pairs of twins, although another source suggested that the number was 730. Segal added that the exact number would never be known. Mengele’s experiments aimed to prove that Aryans were superior to other races.
Able and Heller coped with their ordeal by making up stories about being reunited with their family. They were eventually transferred to former Czechoslovakia, where they qualified as nurses before moving to Israel and then Australia.
Able described her sister as “two bodies and one soul,” saying that their shared experience made them closer. The great-grandmother of six said that “the bond between the twins in Auschwitz was so important,” and “everyone had to be as mindful of their twin as themselves.”
The book highlights the horrors of the Holocaust and serves as a reminder of the atrocities committed during that time. It also honors the resilience of the twins who endured and eventually moved on to rebuild their lives after the war.
