CHAPTER VII
JOSEF MENGELE
In the morning of the day when Severin Bosch arrived at Auschwitz, Natasha Sokolova, a 19-year-old teenager, began her usual chores in dr. Mengele’s infirmary.
At dawn, they had all crowded up in the common bathroom, where merely some droplets of cold water had touched her body. ‘It’s good, even so,’ she told herself when the electric alarm had indicated that they were to evacuate the space. She had cried at five in the morning, when they had been summoned to the square for the roll call. Ten women dead. That was all. A number like any other, such numbers are uttered with strange ease when one is not involved. They brought the bodies, naked, long, white, shapeless planks, impersonal, unknown faces. They were once women, now they were nothing. Some prisoners car
