translated by Georgia de Chamberet
The old saw of asking Daddy what he did in the war is given a hellish new twist in Olivier Guez’s novel, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele. “Dad, what did you do in Auschwitz?,” Rolf Mengele asks his father, whose nickname, “the Angel of Death,” Rolf has only recently learned about. “My duty,” Dr. Josef Mengele replies. “My military duty in the name of German science was to protect the organic biological community, purify the blood, eliminate foreign bodies.”
This chilling exchange, which arrives near the end of Guez’s lean, unsparing book, has the ring of truth. Narrative nonfiction, especially concerning someone as heinous as Mengele, is a perilous exercise at the best of times. But Guez, a French journalist and the author of several books, has already earned his reader’s trust by the thoroughness of his documentation and research, which included traveling to the various South American countries where Mengele concealed himself after World War II.
