Surviving Dr. Mengele

Scary Holocaust story:

Her mother gave her four diamonds to be used to buy bread should she ever find herself hungry during World War II, but those diamonds gave Irene Weisberg Zisblatt the fortitude to survive the Holocaust.

''I can not buy bread with your diamonds, mother, but as long as I am alive they will stay with me,'' she wrote in her memoir, The Fifth Diamond: The Story of Irene Weisberg Zisblatt.

...Zisblatt's entire family was killed in the gas chambers, and those four diamonds were the last mementoes of them. The only way Irene could keep the diamonds hidden was to swallow and retrieve them over and over again. She did this for 15 months.

Zisblatt told the audience how, as a young prisoner in the camps, she was a favorite of Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed experiments and surgeries on her and other prisoners without anesthesia. A girl named Sabka was another of Mengele's regular victims. Though they weren't allowed to speak, they formed a friendship and Zisblatt drew strength from their bond.

''The diamonds survived because, to me, they were the strength, the hope, the courage, and my mother, so they had to survive,'' Zisblatt said. In having a valuable secret from the Nazis, she felt that she was defeating her torturers. ``For every time that I was hungry, beaten or was tortured with experiments, I was hitting back by keeping my mother's diamonds.''

Mengele injected chemicals into her eyes in an attempt to change their color and forced her to remain in a cold room for days. He injected viruses under Zisblatt's fingernail and surgically experimented on her to find a way to remove the numbers tattooed on her arm. Afterward, he ordered the nurse to administer a lethal injection to both girls, but the nurse worked for the underground and was able to free them, one of many miracles Zisblatt experienced.

''Mengele was the most good-looking man,'' she said. ``He could have been the one scientist in the world who could have developed extraordinary things for humanity, but he became a murderer. He would look at me and smile and at times I could not believe this man could ever hurt me, he could be so charming. But the next minute, he was cutting me up into little pieces.''

In 1945, Irene and Sabka were part of a group of 5,000 prisoners forced to march in the cold. Every day, weakened prisoners dropped dead around her. After two months, they escaped. Exhausted and covered in lice, they walked through the forest and managed to stay alive by digging up food.

The pair were finally liberated by Gen. George Patton's Third Army, but Sabka died the very next day. Once again, Zisblatt lost her only family. After her recovery, she was taken in by relatives in America and began a new life with a new name. She married in 1956, and although she had been given watery soup filled with chemicals to destroy her reproductive organs, she gave birth to a son and a daughter in the 1960s.

...''For 50 years, I didn't say a word. I didn't want my children to live with my pain,'' she said.