René and I

This documentary film focuses on the lives of René and Irene, surviving twin prisoners and experimentation victims at Auschwitz. As a twin, I was really drawn to their story - especially because they are boy/girl twins like my brother and I. What makes their time at Auschwitz especially interesting is not necessarily they fact that they were subjected to horrific medical experimentation, but that they were given the chance to live. Most other children their age were sent immediately to the gas chambers upon arrival at the camps. Their story is really quite chilling - both in the camp and their experience afterwards.



Irene and Rene were born Renate and Rene Guttmann on December 21, 1937 in Teplice Sanov, Czechoslovakia. Their family moved the Prague shortly after they were born. Their father was taken by the Germans in 1939 and sent to Auschwitz, never to be seen by the family again - he died there in December, 1941. Irene, René, and their mother were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and later to the Auschwitz camp in 1943. They were separated from their mother and never saw her again. Shortly after, René and Irene were separated, spotting each other just once through the barbed wire during their almost three year stay at Auschwitz. While there, they where they were experimented on by Josef Mengele as part of his twins research. René was used as the control while Irene was subject to numerous injections and tests that made her very ill. Mengele wanted to find a way to understand the genetic code of twins because he believed that he would be able to repopulate post-war Germany with the master, Aryan race.



After liberation, René and Irene were still separated for quite some time. They were both taken in by people - Irene by a Polish woman and René by a Czech doctor. René then went to live with the Mann family. Irene was later sent to an orphanage in France. She said that even there, she was always alone - no one knew what had happened to her and her story was much different than any of the other girls there. She was taken to the United States and eventually adopted by a Long Island family - The Slotkins. When she told them that she had a brother, they did everything in their power to find him and bring him to the United States so they could adopt him, too. They did - and René and Irene were reunited after twelve years of separation.



An activist, Irene wants to make the Holocaust known. When she was younger, most people in the United States knew of the atrocities committed to the Jews of Europe and worse yet, most did not care to know. Both René and Irene say that after liberation, they never talked about what had happened to them - not even to each other, for a very long time. The focus of the film is not even necessarily what happened to them in the camps. Yes, they suffered, but they also feel lucky to have been able to live through it. It is more about what it was like for them after the war. Never having a childhood. Having lost their entire family. Separation from one another for over a decade. Strange, new environments and constant readjustment. At one point in the film, they discuss a trip they took to Jerusalem in 1985 to meet up with other twin survivors so that they could hold a mock trial against Mengele. They recall that when they found out that Mengele's body had been discovered in Brazil, they were upset that he would never be brought to justice and that his evil nature would live on as demonic hearsay for most people rather than factual truth as they had witnessed it.

The film serves as a tribute to tolerance, to the endurance of the human spirit, and to the triumph of good over evil. One of the lines that stood out to me was something Irene said at the very end - the road to Auschwitz is paved in silence. I found this to be really interesting and remniscent of some of the discussions we've had in class about guilt and remembering. The holocaust happened and it must be discussed.