♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This magazine was the beginning.

It was a very, very big shock to me, and I don't understand how anybody in the world convinced him to take a picture of himself and show the tattoo number.

-Until she saw his picture in life magazine, Judith Richter knew almost nothing about her father's time in Auschwitz.

She only knew that her father, a man named Erno "Zvi" Spiegel, was 29 years old when he was deported, along with 430,000 Hungarian Jews, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

The children he cared for at the camp would come to know him as Spiegel Bácsi, "Uncle Spiegel."

-I owe my life to him.

I mean, that's something that not many people can say, that they owe their life to some stranger.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ We left on July 6th, 1944.

-You remember the date?

-Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

-How come?

-Well, I was 11 years old.

I wasn't a baby anymore.

-11.

Same as my brother.

Twins.

[ Chuckles ] -Twins, huh?

-[ Speaking Hebrew ] -[ Speaking Hungarian ] ♪♪ -Three days in a cattle car.

There were about 70 people, including my extended family and cousins.

♪♪ -[ Speaking Hungarian ] -[ Speaking Hebrew ] -[ Speaking Hebrew ] -[ Speaking Hebrew ] ..."resettle" you, we will bring it to you.

-We were afraid.

We're...apprehensive.

We didn't know what's going to happen.

Had no idea.

We didn't know anything what's happening in Auschwitz.

We never heard the word "Auschwitz" until we got there.

-[ Speaking Hungarian ] -The Nazis used cremation to dispose of many of the bodies of the more than six million people they killed during their plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

It's likely that at least a million of those murdered died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

-It was my brother and I, my mother and my sister and some cousins.

That was when Mengele took us out.

He was going along, walking along the row of people and asked for Zwillinge.

-"Zwillinge" is German for "twins," and for reasons no one understood, the twins were being singled out.

The Nazis used SS doctors to choose who would be conscripted into labor camps and who would die in the gas chambers.

Children were spared from immediate death if they were twins, alive, but destined to become subjects in the macabre experiments of the camp's chief doctor, Josef Mengele, known as the Angel of Death.

Mengele used hundreds of twin children in his pseudo-scientific experiments.

Only a small fraction of those children survived.

-If they were the same age as us and he wasn't a twin, he never got in there.

He finished up in the gas chambers.

They died.

They never made it.

-I didn't even know what "Zwillinge" means, but my mother spoke German, so she pointed us out.

She obviously felt that we would be better off.

They were asking for twins, and she volunteered.

Had she not volunteered, I wouldn't be alive today.

-Sometimes siblings who bore a striking resemblance to each other, like the Reichenberg brothers, were mistakenly identified as twins, an error that likely spared their lives.

They were temporarily safe, but any revelation of the truth would mean certain death.

-There was an ambulance, a military ambulance, and we're taken -- put in the ambulance, and that was it.

And that's the last time I saw my mother and sister.

-The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex included the main camp at Auschwitz One, Auschwitz Two -- the Birkenau killing center, which held up to 100,000 people at a time -- and Auschwitz Three, a slave labor factory.

The twins were taken to Auschwitz Two, Birkenau.

-As soon as we got into the F Lager, into the barrack, we got the numbers.

That was the very first thing.

-With a stroke of his pen, Erno Spiegel had changed the boy's birthdates, making them twins and effectively saving their lives.

Erno Spiegel and his twin sister, Magda, were pulled from the lines.

Magda was sent to the women's camp and told to leave her son Shmuel behind with her mother, not knowing that her mother and her son would both be murdered.

♪♪ ♪♪ -First time I saw Zvi Spiegel, he was greeting us and presumably, I guess, he was trying to comfort us.

But at that point, I had no idea what happened to the rest of the family.

-The first question was, "When can we see our mother?"

And he said, "I'm sorry, but look at the flames over there.

That's where mother is right now."

He said it -- broke it to us immediately so we don't even have any high hopes.

Gave it bluntly -- "You won't see your mother anymore."

♪♪ -I think we were crying probably the first couple of days.

-I started crying for a little while and then never again.

I didn't cry since then.

I don't remember crying ever about these things.

Maybe I cried because I was angry or something like that, but not -- not on that.

-Spiegel lived with the boys in their barracks at Birkenau and was assigned the grim task of escorting the twins to Mengele's office for medical experiments.

♪♪ -After we were in the barracks, the next day, we had to go for the first visit with Mengele, The first blood taking, the first measurements, the eyes and the size.

All this.

-The first thing we had to do is take a shower And then the ambulance would come and he would come with us and we would be taken to Mengele's office.

♪♪ Mengele never talked to us, actually.

He just instructed Spiegel what to -- tell us what we need to do.

-Josef Mengele was raised in affluence in Bavaria.

He was well educated and well versed in classical music and art and earned doctoral degrees in both medicine and anthropology.

But hiding behind that patrician facade was one of the most notorious mass murderers in history.

-He was a mass murderer, but he was a unique mass murderer because he was -- He didn't kill more people than his boss or Hitler or whatever.

But the thousands and tens of thousands that he's responsible for, for their death, he knew every one of them.

Most mass murderers don't know their victims.

He knew every one of them because he looked in their eye before he chose them for death.

-Mengele condemned hundreds of thousands of Jews to a terrible death in the gas chambers.

If a twin died because of one of his experiments, Mengele would order the execution of the surviving twin so that their bodies could be autopsied and compared.

♪♪ Twin studies had been used by German doctors to advance Nazi racial ideologies.

Mengele conducted twin experiments, including injecting chemicals into children's eyes, exposing them to pathogens including typhus and tuberculosis, and removing and dissecting human organs.

If his victims survived, they were often left blind or maimed.

♪♪ ♪♪ Though he was in charge of the twins, Spiegel was also a subject of Mengele's experiments.

Through it all, he remained focused on the well-being of the boys.

-He was a father figure to us.

We had no father there, so he was -- he was the authority.

-So he started teaching us a little bit of math here, a little bit of geography, but mostly outside.

-He was teaching history, geography... There were older twins, but the small kids like us, he -- he was a guardian, if you like.

I understand that the girls, who had a different camp, twin girls, never had a leader.

They never had a guardian.

I don't know how they did it, but they were on their own.

♪♪ I mean, other than twins, there was nobody -- no other kids.

Oh, yeah, the gypsies had some kids there in the neighboring camp.

Gypsies had families until they were liquidated.

-The Romani people, at that time known as gypsies, were also a target for the Nazis' ethnic cleansing.

♪♪ ♪ -One day, a train pulled up.

The tracks were right in front of the camp, and they were full of gypsy men.

I don't speak Romani, obviously, but they were shouting to the womenfolk and children from the cattle cars.

It was the next camp.

We didn't understand what they were saying, but they were -- they were talking to -- It looked like they were happy.

And -- And then a few hours later, the train pulled out with the men inside.

I have no idea where they were taken.

Probably some labor camp.

That night, the gypsy camp was liquidated.

-There was about a thousand or maybe even more gypsies in there.

And during one night they sent them all to the gas chamber.

♪♪ -We heard some cries, yeah.

And -- But next morning, there was no -- there were no gypsies.

-So we had a feeling that, hey, it's coming closer to us.

-I think it was in October that Dr.

Thilo came to the barracks.

-You knew him?

-Not before.

I never saw him.

I don't know how we knew his name.

Maybe Zvi Spiegel knew his name.

-That I will never forget.

Dr.

Thilo made us line up, undress totally.

And then the "Blockalteste" was over there with a piece of paper and pencil.

This number.

This number.

This is okay.

Write up this number.

This number.

So we knew what's happening.

-He did get us undressed and lined up and pointed to the kids that were obviously small, too small to do hard labor.

We had been in the camp by that time quite a while.

So we knew what selection was And -- Well, we're going to be taken to the gas chambers.

-I knew that I'm going to die.

And, yes, being an optimist all my life, I didn't even think about the other thing.

I was -- I was thinking about revenge and killing.

-He was trying to comfort us.

"Nothing is going to happen," "Don't worry," and -- -Did you believe him?

-No.

No.

No.

We knew what was gonna happen.

-Spiegel's decision could have led to his immediate execution.

He ran to the guard at the gate, trying to get word to Mengele.

-I think Zvi somehow got in touch with Mengele.

-Now, I didn't know at the time what happened.

I didn't know that Zvi Spiegel went to see Mengele or called Mengele.

I mean, that was unheard of.

[ Chuckles ] I mean, you know, there's God, and then there's Mengele.

You don't talk to Mengele.

You don't call him on the phone.

-Obviously, Mengele wasn't aware of it.

I understand Thilo wasn't on the same level.

-Mengele was angry that a junior officer had undermined his authority and ordered the selections stopped.

As the twins awaited their fate, the door opened.

Spiegel entered and told them they were safe.

They asked him what happened.

He didn't answer.

-I mean, we saw the corpses.

And they were picked up every night or every morning.

We saw them.

We knew about death.

-By mid-January, with the Soviet army advancing towards the camp, the Nazis destroyed the crematoriums and other evidence of their crimes.

They rounded up 56,000 able-bodied prisoners for a forced march west to help the Nazi war effort.

The younger twins were too weak for the journey.

The older twins thought the march was a chance to stay alive.

They were convinced remaining would mean certain death, but the journey west would be so perilous, it would later become known as the Death Marches.

-And some of them went.

Some of the older twins did join, and the younger, like us, we felt that we were too young.

Obviously, too weak, too young to go on a long march.

That's a good question.

I don't know.

Maybe he felt responsibility for us.

I don't know.

-Because he was our father, basically.

The twins's father.

And we begged him, Please take us away from here."

-Amidst the violence and the chaos, as some Germans fled and the Soviet army approached, the twins were marched out of Birkenau, certain that they would die.

-When we were walked to the actual buildings in Auschwitz proper, there was a wooded area somewhere in between.

And we were supposed to be eliminated right there and then on the way to Auschwitz.

And by the time we got to that wooded area, the -- the guys with the machine gun were gone.

-I was an optimist all my life.

And I said, "I'm going to make it."

And I did make it.

I looked out the window.

The piece of pane cut my face a little bit.

I was bleeding.

And I saw the first Russian soldier passing by under the window.

And I saw a second one afterwards.

And I said, "Hey, that's it.

We are liberated."

-If the Russians are there, the Germans can't be there.

And that's it.

That's liberation.

-The feeling that I'm free again.

You don't even know what kind of feeling is that.

Hard to describe.

-Look, in Auschwitz, um, 95% of your survival was luck.

5% was the will to live and to have smarts.

But whoever tells you that you survived because you had a will to survive doesn't know what he's talking about.

It was plain luck.

-And your luck was?

-That we stayed.

♪♪ ♪ There was a Jewish guy, a Russian Jewish soldier, who actually spoke Yiddish, and he was looking at us -- at the small kids.

And he was -- he was really shocked at what he saw.

-With the Nazis retreating and the Soviet army in pursuit, Spiegel and the twins found themselves on their own at Auschwitz.

They faced the prospect of a long and dangerous journey back to their homes, uncertain if those homes even still existed.

-I don't think Zvi Spiegel had the idea of assembling the kids and taking them home.

He just wanted to go home himself.

But then we kids approached him and basically begged him to take us with him.

-First of all, he was able to speak quasi-Russian, and quasi a little bit of the Polish.

Says, "Take away because, if by any chance, the Germans turn around and come back, we will not make it."

-Spiegel kept a detailed list of the children in his charge as they set out into one of the coldest European winters of the 20th century, where temperatures regularly dropped well below freezing.

-We had no idea what this whole thing entails.

How're we going to go?

Are we going to take a train, a bus, walk?

No, I had no -- I had no concept of -- of what that meant.

-A day later, we started walking.

Two days and two nights, we walked, bitter cold and just walked.

-On the first night, they found an abandoned schoolroom and huddled in a corner to stay warm.

-Somehow he always found something.

Always was able to find something.

-The second night, a Polish farmer offered Spiegel and the boys shelter in a barn.

They lit a fire to stay warm.

But the straw they were sleeping on caught fire, sending the boys back into the relentless snow.

One day later, a Red Army convoy stopped beside the twins, and the commanders ordered their troops to transfer the children to Krakow.

The soldiers loaded the children into three army trucks.

The third truck had an accident, and one of the twins, Chaim Katz, was thrown from the truck and killed.

♪♪ -Once we got to Krakow, we stayed there for, I think, at least a week, but probably more.

-90% of Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Some of the survivors joined local authorities to help the refugees who were trying to make their way back from the camps.

These Polish Jews helped place the children and Spiegel in a hotel that had been hastily abandoned by Nazi SS officers.

-I remember the building we lived in, in Krakow, the address.

It was Dluga Ulica.

38, I think.

We went into there -- There was not a man in there.

There was no furniture.

All the house was -- everything was empty.

I don't know how, but he was so clever that every time he was able to get to something.

-In Krakow, Spiegel needed to obtain documentation for himself and the children to show that they were refugees from Auschwitz.

He then secured a letter from local authorities granting permission for passage to Hungary.

Spiegel also needed time to find transportation.

The overwhelmed charity organizations strained to offer what they could, providing the children with just one meal a day.

-We were encouraged to go around and beg for food.

We were told that, because we were short of food, to go from house to house and ask for -- for a meal.

And we did that.

Some -- Some of the Poles were generous enough, and some of them just threw us out.

-Sometimes he was able to find a train going to east, a flat car that used to carry tanks.

Sometimes we started walking.

-Oh, we went on trucks, coal trains, walked.

-I remember that in one big city we walked through, there was not house standing.

There was no people in that city.

We haven't seen anybody in there.

I still remember how it looked like every house was demolished.

-There was a coal train, and we were sitting on the coal for a while.

I can't remember where -- which part of the trip.

-Spiegel was told that a coal train was headed towards Hungary in the south.

After a grueling 93 miles, they arrived in Tarnow, covered in coal dust.

It was then that he realized they'd been traveling in the wrong direction, east instead of south.

Overwhelmed by the influx of refugees, the Soviets sent the group farther east on trucks toward cities that had set up Jewish aid centers.

On their journey, they encountered a group of women and children, fellow refugees, who asked if they could join.

Spiegel welcomed them.

By Spiegel's meticulous count, their numbers grew to 153 people marching towards home.

Their path led them to the Ukrainian border, where Spiegel, the children, and the other refugees braced themselves for the final stretch of their journey.

-It took us from Auschwitz itself to Nézsa, which is Hungary, a part of Hungary, northern Hungary, nearly two months.

-Against the backdrop of Eastern Europe's ravaged landscape, local authorities were in turmoil.

So Spiegel took matters into his own hands and carefully charted a course through the desolation, selecting towns along the route where he found whatever food and meager aid could be spared.

As they battled relentless hunger, constant illness, and harsh weather, Spiegel and the children persevered.

Word of mouth spread about the young survivors from Auschwitz.

In one town, residents wrote on Spiegel's identity papers, "They have been seen!"

Spiegel and the boys made it to a railroad junction in the city of Chop, where he had the agonizing task of splitting the boys into groups for the final stage of the journey to their hometowns in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

-Spiegel basically parted from us.

-I don't remember if we did any major hugging or something like that.

We just parted ways in.

-He insisted that when we get to Budapest, or home, we write to him.

-I have the card here, the other side of the card with the address and everything on it.

This is the postcard.

"Luckily arrived March 11th..." -Dear Mr.

Spiegel, after we parted at the train station, we were on the train on our way to Budapest.

-Dear Spiegel Bácsi, we are here in Pest studying at the Hebrew Gymnasium.

-We read in the newspaper several times about Dr.

Mengele and what happened at Auschwitz.

-This week I met Laci Kiss and the two Laufers.

-Write as soon as you can.

-Many kisses to you, Spiegel Bácsi.

-Your two twins, Gyurika and Bandi.

-Gyorgy Kuhn.

-"Somogyi, Tamas and Peter."

That's the letter.

♪♪ ♪♪ -When Spiegel at last arrived at his family home, he found that another family had moved in.

Alone, he traveled to Czechoslovakia, where he was reunited with his twin sister.

There, Spiegel fell in love with Rachel Anna Hecht, a fellow survivor of Auschwitz who, like him, had grown up in Hungary.

And one year to the day after their liberation, they were married at Altneuschul in Prague, the oldest active synagogue in Europe.

A little more than one year later, they welcomed their first child, Judith.

And two years after that, they immigrated to the newly established Jewish state of Israel, where their son, named Israel, was born.

♪♪ ♪♪ -We were told to refer to my father as -- as a delicate porcelain figure.

I knew that my father was a twin.

I knew that his sister, my Aunt Magda, was with him.

I knew that there were somehow in Auschwitz.

I also knew that she lost her little son, Shmuel, because there was a picture of him, but not more than that.

There was some quiet noise in our home.

Quiet noise was, you don't ask your father about the Holocaust.

-He was very closed.

You know, he never talked about it.

But I knew that in a way -- that he suffered from stories that my mother used to say, but we never heard them from my father.

-Zvi, or Erno, never discussed with me anything about himself.

I knew he was a Holocaust survivor.

I didn't know any details about his experience.

-Well, in those years, there was some kind of mixed emotions about the whole issue of Holocaust survivors.

The question was discussed in school, the question was in the street, the questions about how the Jews went to the camps.

How come they just walked through the crematorium?

-For 30 years, Erno Spiegel dedicated himself serving as the chief financial officer for the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv.

He was a respected and beloved member of that artistic community.

And for 30 years, he maintained a steadfast silence, revealing nothing about the twins or his time at Auschwitz.

-He was very proud about his work.

He loved the theater.

It was such a -- almost a gift from destiny.

And he would see everything.

And he and my mother would get dressed and go to the theater, and they loved it.

-Although Spiegel rarely spoke about the war and the Holocaust, he and his wife instilled in their children that they were the ultimate victory over the Nazis.

-The way I was brought up was that "we don't have revenge."

There is no revenge.

There are no -- The word "revenge" was considered an ugly word in this and a waste.

What we have to do is to be better.

We have to excel.

We have to work hard.

We have to be good to the society.

-In 1979, Judith, Kobi, and their young children moved to the United States, where Judith pursued a PhD in psychology at Boston University and Kobi conducted research at MIT.

It was during that time that a serendipitous purchase began to reveal the details of her father's hidden past.

-When we lived in Boston, I was doing my PhD work, and I remember one evening Kobi went to the supermarket to get some food.

-And as I'm standing in line for the cashier, there's always a stand on the side with magazines.

And I plucked it and started leafing into it because on the front of it was the first picture of the moons of Saturn.

And leafing through it, suddenly, I see a picture of Erno.

I immediately pluck two more of these and came back home.

-And he comes, and he throws on my desk the LIFE magazine copy.

And I see the word "Mengele" on one of the pages.

And it's not that I never heard the word "Mengele."

Everybody in Israeli knew the word "Mengele."

And I go to the next page of it, and I see a picture of my father.

And... you immediately find out that there is some relationship between the name Mengele that you know from around, you know, and, uh, my father.

-My sister called me from Boston, and she told me they have an article about my father, about somebody that he saved, the two brothers.

And I read it 10 times to make sure that I understand that that's what my father -- It was very emotional that time, like now.

-I remember like today that he put it on my desk, and that's how I found out.

-I couldn't believe it.

-There's a LIFE magazine.

Right there on the front page, there's something about the universe, the stars, and everything.

We started leafing through it, and suddenly it comes Mengele, Mengele's twins, And the next page, another pair of twins, and the following page, Zvi Spiegel and a story with the picture that my brother and myself are on it.

I called up Washington, the Israeli embassy.

Asked me, "Give me, please, the address of Zvi Spiegel in Tel Aviv."

I got back five answers.

We attached that picture from the LIFE magazine.

We attached to it the letter.

-The first thing I remember is him sending me a letter that came to him, to translate it.

When I translate the letter, I immediately understand that one of the twins in the US, he also saw the article we saw and is trying to locate him.

-Out of the five, one of them came back and answered.

And then he said, "I will be in Boston, this and this date, and we should meet."

-Our landlord in Brookline, we showed him the article, and then Judith told him that her father is coming to visit us.

And he asked, could he bring newspaper and TV to commemorate this thing?

-I remember that the same day morning, there is a huge truck of the broadcasting in Boston.

-All the TV guys with the antennas fill the street.

And they met.

-The route which brought Peter Somogyi to Brookline was convoluted and filled with coincidence, tragedy, unbelievable luck, and incredible timing.

Peter Somogyi and his brother Tamas were Hungarians sent to Auschwitz in 1944.

Because they were twins, they were selected for medical experiments by the infamous Dr.

Josef Mengele.

The inmate in charge of young twins was Ernest Spiegel.

Because of a LIFE magazine story on Dr.

Mengele, which both saw purely by chance, Somogyi and Spiegel found each other.

Today they met for the first time in 38 years.

-And I thought that they would cry, they'll do some, uh, acts... super respectful meeting.

Hugging each other, and I remembered that I was shocked and respecting so much their self-control.

-We were just sitting as an audience to the most impressive emotional thing, which was a discussion without any stop.

-It was like my father meeting somebody, a young child that was with him in the camp.

Still, I didn't know the story.

-It took time for Erno to open to this, but then it became a very warm and full discussion when Peter started to explain what he did with the twins, starting to tell the story, how he was teaching them, how he was guiding them, how he was... I think for the first time comes the story of the non-twins that he made twins in order to save and things like that.

And suddenly a whole story starts developing in front of us.

-That's how it started.

Everything.

Until then, I was clammed up.

My brother was clammed up.

We couldn't talk to each other.

-Some people are different.

Some people talk about it all the time.

I don't like to.

No, it's just too -- Maybe it's too emotional for me.

I don't want to do it.

[ Exhales heavily ] -It changed in Israel, and all of a sudden it was "okay" to be a Holocaust survivor and still be a mensch.

There was much more respect to Holocaust survivors and deeper understanding.

♪♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ -In the last couple of months in several parts of the world, there has been a new campaign developing to try to find and bring to justice one of the 20th century's most evil men.

His name was, or perhaps is, Josef Mengele.

From Israel today, a call comes from some of Mengele's former victims, subjects of some of his most horrendous experiments.

They have gathered in Israel this week to present a very graphic testimony at a symbolic trial about Mengele's crimes.

-I'd like to call this morning's session to order, and I'd like to turn the chair over to Mr.

Terlo, who will call some witnesses.

Mr.

Terlo.

-In '85 -- that was when we came back to Israel -- there was a mock trial in Yad Vashem in which they explored the activities of Dr.

Mengele.

I remember there was a big hall, a lot, a lot of people.

Of course, there was a big issue in our home whether my father should go or not if he wants to go or not.

-It was in Jerusalem.

I remember it was a big hall.

They called my father to give a witness, to be a witness.

-[ Speaking Hebrew ] -After few people gave some testimony, he was called up to go to the stage, and on the stage there were about five or six leading researchers of the Holocaust, and they asked for witnesses to come.

And when my father came up, I was, again, very worried because he was then, at that time, very weak already.

I was sitting next to his sister, my aunt Magda, and she told me this story and she said that she still feels the hand of her son in her hand when she gave him to his grandmother.

[ Applause ] When the people got up and started to clap for my father, I turned my head and I looked in the hall, and I was very surprised, you know?

All of a sudden, my father becomes a hero.

He's being remembered as somebody who saved lives.

That's a hero, no?

-Deciding to take the kids that were put under you in a most helpless position a person could find himself... You tell them, "When this is over, I will take you back home."

When you know this is not going to be over.

You are going to be over.

Your life is going to be over.

And yet you decide to say this to them.

You do not believe that.

But you want them to believe that.

This is being a hero, against all odds.

-They had a lot of people that knew him after that.

Some twins that were there, in that also.

All the twins came out from different places, different places in the world, some in Israel, some in the United States, some in Europe, Hungary.

-Many survivors came to me, and I remember one say, "We are the children of Spiegel Bácsi."

So I said, "So you are -- we are family."

All of a sudden, I had "brothers," many male that were considering my father to be their father also.

That was when I grasped -- It was the first time that I really grasped the whole saga of my father in the camp.

♪ -And I get an email asking for some help about testimonies related to the Spiegel story.

And so I respond to the researcher saying that this is really interesting because I grew up with the name Spiegel because my father was in the twin camp.

And then this researcher, a Hungarian woman, writes back that, "We are very much interested in these and these names, especially -- I don't know if you know anything about the twin Gyorgy Kuhn and Ishtvan Kuhn."

And then that's when I'm kind of, "I do know."

So I respond saying, "Well, actually, he's my father."

-When we met, it was amazing.

It was like as if we know each other and we are sisters.

And we are very good friends, and I went to visit them in their home in Budapest, so I met her father and mother, and that experience was so uplifting.

[ Conversing in Hungarian ] You know, it's -- it's a stranger, totally stranger, and I feel connected as if we were there together always.

[ Indistinct conversations ] -Erno Spiegel died in 1993.

He was 78 years old.

20 years later, Judith traveled to Auschwitz with her family to pay tribute to her father.

-He would stay with us and our kids for the weekend, and he would always come with a loaf of bread.

He would give us the loaf of bread and ask us if we have bread.

Always.

That's why when we, for the first time visited Auschwitz, Judith brought a loaf of bread and put it and then took out a sandwich and ate a sandwich in Barrack 14.

♪♪ -My father used to say towards the end of his life, Auschwitz was a place that even birds would not fly over.

So I put the bread, and somebody said, "What do you think?"

"Who will eat it?"

I said, "The birds."

Now they should fly over Auschwitz because there is a bread and we remember that there was a very good-hearted man there.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -I'm holding a pen, and according to the story that Erno told me, this is the pen he had in his pocket when he came to Auschwitz.

And this is the pen that, together with thousands of men, was thrown into the big pile of pens.

There was a pile of pens, pile of eyeglasses, and so on.

And when Mengele made him responsible for the -- for the kids and told him, "You will have to document the names of everyone.

Every time a twin comes, you will have to add them to the group and document it."

He told Mengele, according to his story, "I need my pen."

So Mangala went with him back to the pile, and he found his pen.

And he said, "This is the pen with which I wrote everything, including the documents that you see."

And he continued to use this pen until he died.

-You know, I'm not a Catholic, but in the Catholic church, a saint becomes a saint if he performed two miracles.

Um... Well, he performed at least 20.

-We just -- We just trusted him.

-I think I know what he meant.

It's his life.

To me, it's even more so.

As a consequence of that decision that day, that they should say that they were born on the same day, that helped him go home, get married, have children, and me have children and my children to be alive.

And I think that's -- that's so much more than one life.

It's -- It's -- There is continuation.

[ Indistinct conversations ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -I decided that it's about time to gather all the twins, and I invited them from wherever they are in the world.

A few came, and each of them told their story.

And I decided to construct a plaque there for my parents and for the twin children who perished in Auschwitz and never had any tomb or anything of that.

So, for that event, I thought that we should inaugurate it with the living twins.

And then the Rabbi organized a Bar Mitzvah for them because in the camp there were less than 13 years old, when you usually celebrate the bar mitzvah, so this was their event.

There was no one who didn't have tears in his or her eyes.

[ Both speaking Hebrew ] [ Up-tempo music plays ] [ Singing in Hebrew ] [ Rhythmic clapping ] ♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ I think that this story belongs to more people.

It belongs to the legacy of the survivors of the Holocaust.

It is a story that the hero of is my father, but the questions that we should ask ourselves -- Who are we?

What would we choose to do?

And what is humanity for us?

♪♪ ♪♪ [ Camera shutter clicks ] ♪ ♪♪ [ "Etz Chaim" plays ] [ Singing in Hebrew ] ♪♪ ♪♪ [ Singing in Hebrew ] ♪♪ ♪