The cruelty of Mengele and the fate of a newborn baby girl

Extreme thinness, a bit of cunning, and a few strokes of luck helped the young woman hide her pregnancy until the final weeks. However, news spread through the camp that there were two women in an advanced state of pregnancy: besides Ruth, there was also Berta. Mengele learned of it and ordered them to be summoned. He asked them numerous questions, unable to understand how they had escaped the selections. According to his criteria and those of Auschwitz, they should have been sent immediately to the line for the gas chamber. Since that had not happened and they were now close to giving birth, he decided to spare them: they would be allowed to give birth to their children. What he did not tell the expectant mothers was that he already had an experiment with the newborns in mind.

Mengele visited the two pregnant women every day in the infirmary. He did not go there just to see them. The infirmary was his territory, a place full of human guinea pigs among the sick. Ruth saw many young women suffer after being subjected to extremely cruel operations, without any of them knowing exactly what had been done to them or why. For a long time, these women were not even able to speak.

When the day of the birth finally arrived, which Ruth so greatly feared, a Polish midwife, also a prisoner in the camp, went to help her. As the contractions grew stronger and stronger, the woman asked her to lie down.

In Jerusalem, before an increasingly silent audience, Ruth recalled that moment with a sad expression but an unwavering voice: «I lay down on those stones, with nothing. And I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Without soap. Without hot water. Without cotton». She paused, as if to find the courage to continue, then went on: «Nothing. In my own filth, with my baby girl, I went to my bed without a mattress, only with a blanket. We covered ourselves with it». The conditions were so dire that the midwife could not even sterilize the scissors with which she cut the umbilical cord. There were not even diapers. 

The following day, Mengele arrived for his daily visit and saw that Ruth had given birth. He observed the newborn for a long time and, immediately afterward, ordered a doctor to tightly bind the mother's breasts so that she could not breastfeed. He wanted to find out how long a newborn could survive without being fed. Soon, Ruth felt her breasts fill with milk. The baby was hungry and cried incessantly. Mengele came every day to check the bandaging and observe the little girl. 

After seven days of agony and despair, Maca Steinberg, another blind prisoner, offered her help. She managed to obtain an injection of morphine and handed it to Ruth, telling her to use it for the baby. Maca explained that she could not do it herself, because she was a doctor and had taken the Hippocratic oath. She told her that this was Ruth's only chance of survival, because Mengele had already announced that the following day he would take mother and daughter to the gas chamber. In any case, the little girl, by then reduced to skin and bones, had no hope. More than forty years later, before a silent audience, Ruth declared: «I killed my daughter». She paused, ran her tongue over her lips, and continued: «In the morning, Mengele arrived. I was ready to go (to the gas chamber). But he did not want me, he wanted my baby. He did not find her body in the pile of corpses in front of our block», she said with a sad and resigned expression. That was how she escaped the gas chamber, but she was never able to escape the harrowing pain of having lost her daughter.