How an Auschwitz Prisoner Saved the Lives of Twins Targeted for Nazi Medical Experiments

Eighty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Nazi Germany’s biggest killing center, a new documentary screening on June 6 focuses on a 29-year-old prisoner who cared for young twins who were subjected to Nazi medical experiments—giving them hope in a situation that seemed completely hopeless.

Narrated by Liev Schrieber, The Last Twins starts screening on June 6 at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan. The documentary marking a grim milestone in World War II history happens to be on the 81st anniversary of D-Day, a turning point in the Allied forces’ road to victory.

The documentary features survivors who sing the praises of their guardian angel Erno “Zvi” Spiegel, a Hungarian Jewish prisoner ordered to look after them. Spiegel’s daughter, Judith Richter, also speaks in the film about the present-day lessons from her father’s courageous acts.

Here’s what we know about the medical experiments on twins in Auschwitz and how The Last Twins tells Zvi’s story.

Why did Auschwitz conduct experiments on twins?

Nicknamed “the angel of death,” Josef Mengele was “the most notorious of the Nazi doctors,” as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts it. Mengele sought out twins who arrived at Auschwitz in order to subject them to medical experiments. Spiegel, a twin, was separated from his twin sister Magda, and at Auschwitz, Mengele tasked him with looking after a group of male twins and escorting them to Mengele’s office for experiments.

It’s unclear exactly what kinds of medical experiments were performed on these boys. “There’s very little evidence of exactly what was done,” says David Marwell, author of Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death, who did not work on the documentary. The survivors in The Last Twins are among the few left. Many of the twins who were subjected to the experiments did not live to talk about it. The twin prisoners in Auschwitz did not give their consent, and the experiments were not conducted by scientific research standards. If a twin died during one of the experiments, Mengele ordered the surviving twin be executed so their bodies could be autopsied and compared. Twins may have been saved from death by the gas chamber, but many who survived the experiments ended up permanently maimed.

One survivor, Ephraim Reichenberg, who appears in the doc describes how he and his brother were subjected to injections in the neck. His brother was discovered to have a beautiful singing voice, but he did not have one, and the Nazis focused experiments on their necks. A year after the war, his brother died a painful death, and in 1967, Ephraim’s throat and gullet were removed. He speaks in the documentary with a voice amplifier. Spiegel, he says, “gathered all of the young children around him and took care of them, taught them, and watched over them.”

How Spiegel helped the twins

While Spiegel couldn’t stop the experiments, he did his best to keep the boys alive. In a place where prisoners were known by numbers tattooed to their arms, he made sure the boys called each other by their real names. If one boy found a piece of food, then he had the youngster share it with the rest of his peers so everyone could enjoy some of it. He even taught them math, history, and geography in the barracks. “He was a father figure to us,” says survivor Tom Simon. “We had no father there.” 

The documentary also features a man that Spiegel snuck in as a twin to save their lives. Gyorgy Kun says he and his brother were directed to the twin medical experiments, even though they weren’t actually twins. Instead of turning them away, Spiegel changed the birthdates for the Kun brothers so that, on paper, it looked like they were born on the same day, and therefore they wouldn’t be sent to the gas chambers.

Mengele was never prosecuted for his crimes and lived in fear that authorities would come after him. Marwell says he didn’t find “any specific evidence that he was in any way remorseful.”

Mengele fled to Brazil after the war. TIME’s 1985 obituary called him “the most hated man in the world.”

After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel moved to the Czech city of Karlovy Vary and lived near his twin sister Magda, who also survived Auschwitz. He got married, had a child, and immigrated to Israel in 1949. LIFE magazine featured him in a 1981 article about Mengele, and surviving twins started to reach out to him. He always took their calls. He died in 1993 at the age of 78.

Richter says her father used to tell his children that Nazis “could take away your family, your house, everything, but they would never be able to take what you have learned and your knowledge.” She cites Spiegel as a reason why she pursued a career in academia and set up a program that schools young people in the basics of medicine. Now she is the co-founder and active chairperson of Medinol, a medical device company, focusing on ethical forms of medical treatment, in stark contrast to the unethical medical treatments that her father saw in Auschwitz.

She hopes viewers will inspire them to act and help others. “One person matters,” she says, explaining that she hopes that her father’s story will empower people to be courageous in dark times. “This film is not just a Holocaust film. It’s a universal story about the human spirit triumphing over evil. It’s a story of resilience…not just of surviving, but protecting others.”