Long Lost 
 
 Menachem Bodner last saw his twin brother at age 4, when he was liberated from the infamous Auschwitz laboratory of Dr. Josef Mengele. Now, armed with proof that his brother also survived, he’s watching his search go viral online. 
 
 It’s most likely that Menachem Bodner last saw his identical twin in 1945, in Dr. Josef Mengele’s gruesome Auschwitz laboratory. He was 4 then and doesn’t remember his time in the notorious death camp. But in the 68 years that have followed, Bodner says he’s “always” been certain he was one of a pair. He just didn’t have any proof until this past year. Now, he’s searching for Jeno, a man who probably looks just like him, and who has a distinctive “A-7734” tattoo on his forearm. And 1 million Facebook users are helping him look. 
 
 Mengele, known among prisoners as “the Angel of Death,” was deeply fascinated with twins and used them for research experiments in his macabre Auschwitz lab. Thankfully, Bodner, now 72, has no recollection of the cruelty he most certainly endured while undergoing experiments, though he can remember a sense of paralyzing fear. Unfortunately he also has few impressions of his family’s prewar life in a small town east of Munkacs, Hungary, which is now in the Ukraine. But despite the lack of memories from a war-marred childhood, Bodner says that throughout his life he’s felt a deep connection with his twin—and is positive he’s still alive and out there. But where? 
 
 Until last May, Bodner didn’t even know that his own name was once Elias Gottesmann. Now he knows that. And he knows for certain that he has a twin—thanks to the Nazis’ dogged, pathological documentation of their crimes. Ayana KimRon, a professional genealogist in Israel, found the evidence, clearly written in a record put together by the organization Candles, of twins who were “identified as having been liberated at Auschwitz or from a subcamp”: 
 
 A-7733, Gottesmann, Elias, 4 
 
 A-7734, Gottesmann, Jeno, 4 
 
 
 
 KimRon got onto the case after spotting a posting made on a genealogical forum by a cousin of Bodner’s partner, seeking information about the long-missing brother. When the woman was unable to answer KimRon’s questions, Bodner ended up calling the curious researcher himself. “I was hooked,” KimRon says of that first call. “I said, ‘Look I’m going all the way with you,’ and it turned out to be the project of my life.” Bodner, a retired Israeli tax-service employee living in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon LeZion, was dubious at first, but KimRon began digging anyway. She asked him if he had any sense of his brother, and he told her, “All my life I’ve known that he was alive somewhere; I felt that he was alive.” 
 
 In early March, after months of dead-end trails and fruitless posts within the Jewish and genealogical communities online, KimRon decided the campaign needed a broader audience. She created a Facebook page titled “A7734,” posted a black-and-white shot of a young boy and a caption with his tattoo number, and asked for any clues into his whereabouts. Within 24 hours it had gone viral, and a within a week, the photo has had 23,000 shares, 1.13 million views, and hundreds of comments from readers offering resources, prayers, and words of encouragement. Other twins pledged to help. Amateur etymologists traced their names. One man even attempted to age the photo into what Jeno (known by his nickname Jolli) might look like now. 
 
 Courtesy of Menachem Bodner Menachem Bodner at age 5 after World War II (left) and in the present day. 
 
 “I was astonished by the amount of comments, and I’m very grateful for each and every one one of them,” Bodner, who speaks Hebrew, says of the rapid response. Before talking to The Daily Beast, he and KimRon had been watching the page, mesmerized as the comments and countries rolled in: China, Argentina, Ireland, Portugal, Finland. The success is galvanizing, and Facebook is just the beginning. “I’m going to maximize the Internet,” KimRon says, explaining that her next plan is to build a YouTube channel of Bodner speaking (a Twitter account launched Sunday night). 
 
 In 1945, as allied troops advanced into Poland and the Germans fled Auschwitz—the most notorious of Nazi death camps—a boy approached a young Jewish man searching for his family and asked: “Will you be my father?” When the man asked his name, young Elias Gottesmann took a guess, saying his first name was Mendele and giving a similar-sounding last name. More than a half-century later, he laughs and shrugs when asked how he came up with that new name. 
 
 As the pair walked out of the camp a few days later, they saw a battalion of Soviet soldiers approaching. “I don’t like them,” he told the man. “They didn’t save my brother, Jolli.” Five years later, the ramshackle family moved to Israel. When Bodner turned 20, his adoptive parents told him about those words. Despite searching through Jewish agencies and publishing requests, searches using the name Bodner had yielded no clues about the fate of his brother. 
 
 But when KimRon ran the unique tattoo number through the Red Cross records, she soon found the proof of the twin Bodner always knew existed. In a hospital record dated February 9, 1945—nearly two weeks after Auschwitz was liberated—his brother’s name shows up. Ironically, as Bodner lived with his adoptive family in a neighboring camp, Jolli was just inside those infamous gates. KimRon explains why Bodner never searched for himself or his brother using the inked numbers on his arm: “That’s the symbol of turning human beings into numbers,” she says. “People don’t want to relate to it.” She utilized it because she realized it was the only way past the dead-end trails. 
 
 Patricia Heberer, a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and author of Children During the Holocaust, explains that twins studied by Mengele were housed together in barracks, underwent daily physical examination, and received surgeries or experimentations as a pair. “Experimentation included injections that caused pain or disease, spinal taps and spinal injections, and deliberate infection with certain diseases,” she says. Surgeries were even more gruesome. 
 
 Because of Mengele’s secretive nature (he “destroyed much of the documentation about his ‘research efforts’ in his effort to avoid capture,” Heberer says), many twin survivors, like Jeno and Elias, have spent the rest of their lives unaware of the nature of their experimentation and suffer serious health consequences as well. 
 
 Along with historical records, KimRon found a flock of nearly 70 extended family members both in Israel and the U.S for a man who believed he had no blood relatives. Many of them had searched for Bodner for years. “I was shocked,“ he says. “I thought that nobody would look for me. I had a dream to find someone. It made my dreams come true.” Within less than a year, Bodner has quickly assimilated into his family, and KimRon, who has found herself as part of the clan, says that the relatives “embrace as if they were together since birth.” Bodner speaks to his new cousins weekly, and they’ve spent the past year’s holidays together. “I’m still memorizing the names,” he says with a laugh. 
 
 The enigmatic connection between family members who spend years separated is well documented. Nancy Segal, a psychology professor at California State University, Fullerton, and director of the Twin Studies Center, has spent years researching twin connections. She says that even after decades apart, many twins still find they have similar attitudes, values, and interests upon reuniting. “Sometimes circumstances of rearing and living can get in the way,” she wrote in an email. “But even some who met in their sixties and seventies did well together.” 
 
 Despite the skepticism he had going in to the search, Bodner has been eager to soak up his newfound history. “This man has quick digestion. He wants to face the demons,” KimRon says reverently. In June—just a month after learning of his family—Bodner traveled to his small hometown in what is now Ukraine, but was once Hungary. When he arrived, an old woman approached the group, looking at the house they were eyeing. She still recalled his family. “In this house there were twins,” she told them. Bodner, too, remembered the house and the Gestapo officers who came to take them from it two months before his fourth birthday. “I remember when Nazis came to take us: it was midday, I was outside, and my brother was asleep in bed,” he says. “I saw them coming.” 
 
 This June, Bodner, KimRon and four family members plan to make a trip back to Auschwitz, the death camp that once housed him, his brother, and his mother (a survivor who was murdered a year after the Holocaust while searching for her sons). The last time he was there was just a few weeks after liberation, when a Jewish journalist asked Bodner and his adoptive father to take him. As they approached the gates, the 5-year-old panicked. “I don’t want to go there,” he screamed. “They turn people to dust in there; I don’t want to go there.” ||||| A 93-year-old man who was assigned to confiscate the luggage of prisoners arriving at Auschwitz concentration camp in his capacity as an SS guard has gone on trial in Germany , charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Holocaust victims. 
 
 Oskar Gröning, referred to as ‘the accountant of Auschwitz’, is standing trial in the north German town of Lüneburg in what is a hugely symbolic act as part of authorities’ last-ditch attempt to put the handful of remaining Nazi death camp guards in the dock before they die. 
 
 Only 43 of the 6,500 SS members who worked in the concentration camps have ever faced prosecution. Of those only 25 went to prison and the rest were acquitted. 
 
 Unusually, Gröning has been quite outspoken about the two years he spent in Auschwitz, describing in an autobiography as well as lengthy interviews, some of the horrors he witnessed, and admitting that the events have haunted him his entire life. He admitted knowing about the gas chambers. But he has only ever described himself as a “small cog in the machine” and has repeatedly claimed his innocence. 
 
 On Monday some of around 60 joint plaintiffs who are due to give evidence, expressed their wish that the former bank clerk, who volunteered for the SS as a 20-year-old, will use the trial to admit to having been more than just a passive witness to some of the worst crimes committed against humanity. 
 
 “I would like him to acknowledge in front of the court that he realises what it means that he was even in Auschwitz in the first place, let alone that he probably took the luggage from some of the 49 members of my family who were murdered there,” said 90-year-old Eva Fahidi from Budapest who was sent to Auschwitz as a teenager, and last saw her mother and 11-year-old sister on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. “I am very interested to hear what he has to say, and whether he admits that he helped support the death machinery,” she said. 
 
 Hedy Bohm, 86, who was born in Romania and was deported to Auschwitz with her parents – both of whom were murdered there – travelled from her home in Toronto for the trial. She said she hoped a precendent would be set by the fact the trial is taking place at all. 
 
 “Whether you’re a bookkeeper, a supplier, a driver, a cook, whatever you are, if what you’re doing helps the machinery of death of a regime to keep rolling, you should be called to account. No one should ever be allowed to say ‘I was just a small cog in the machine’,” she said. 
 
 The Gröning prosecution was set in motion following the conviction of the Ukrainian-born death camp guard John Demjanjuk in 2012 who the judge ruled had been an accessory to murder simply by working at the camp. With a new zeal and based on evidence gathered by the Central Office for National Socialist Crime in Ludwigsburg, prosecutors last year launched a nationwide hunt for remaining camp guards, including cases opened and closed several times over the years due to a lack of political will. 
 
 They identified 30 former SS members. Deaths and ill health have prevented the prosecution of most of them, but three of them, including Gröning, are now being brought to justice. 
 
 Prosecutors have concentrated the charge on the period between May and July 1944, the time of the mass deportation of Hungary’s Jewish community to Auschwitz when 137 trains brought 425,000 people to Auschwitz, of whom at least 300,000 were exterminated. 
 
 Gröning worked in the prisoner property administration – responsible for removing the luggage of passengers left on the unloading ramps – after they had been ‘selected’ into groups of who was going to the gas chambers and who was being sent to slave labour. The belongings were supposed to be removed as quickly as possible, so that newcomers to the camp would not suspect the fate that was about to befall them. At that time, with the end of war nearing, the aim was to murder as many prisoners in as short a time as possible and as a result the camp was operating day and night without a break. 
 
 Gröning, a trained bank clerk, was also responsible for counting the money found in the prisoners’ belongings and couriering it, sometimes personally, to the Reich security head office in Berlin, hence his nickname, ‘the accountant of Auschwitz’. 
 
 A report by his seniors on his working performance from 17 October 1944, reads that he had a “flawless character” with a “soldierly appearance that is always solid and correct” and a “reliable world view”. 
 
 In a BBC documentary a decade ago – while declining to admit his own guilt – Gröning said that he saw it as his responsibility to speak out against Holocaust deniers. 
 
 Gröning said: “I see it as my task, now at my age, to face up to these things that I experienced and to oppose the Holocaust deniers who claim that Auschwitz never happened ... I want to tell those deniers I have seen the gas chambers, I have seen the crematoria, I have seen the burning pits – and I want you to believe me that these atrocities happened. I was there.” 
 
 After the war he made a career for himself in a health insurance company, rising to the position of manager. 
 
 Hans Holtermann, Gröning’s lawyer, has said that his client will use the opportunity in Lüneburg to speak – unlike Demjanjuk who remained silent throughout his trial. 
 
 He said it would be in Gröning’s favour that he has given evidence against fellow SS members in other trials, that he has not tried to hide details of his role and that he applied to be transferred from Auschwitz on three occasions. 
 
 The third application was successful. He spent the last months of the war taking part in the Ardenne offensive against the allies, where he was wounded. He was then taken prisoner by the British until 1948. 
 
 Thomas Walther, the lawyer for the co-plaintiffs who has spent years trying to bring the case, said the law had not changed, rather the attitude of the justice system in the way it should be applied. He said: “Over the years many investigations have fallen by the wayside because it has always been said: ‘He’s too small a fish, we haven’t got time’ or: ‘What he did was redundant’, or: ‘He didn’t kill himself’. 
 
 “It has meant that many survivors have been living with the pain for 70 years of knowing that perpetrators have got away with the excuse of saying: ‘I was only following orders’. With this trial they have the chance to retrieve some of their dignity and to have a voice on behalf of their relatives, because they are finally being taken seriously by the German justice system.” 
 
 Judith Kalmann, 61, from Toronto, who is due to give evidence in late April, said: “For those who say it’s too little too late, I’d say it’s certainly better late than never. It’s very healing to get this recognition for my father, who lost 120 members of his family through the Holocaust, 30 of them in Auschwitz.” 
 
 Christophe Heubner, a German writer and the vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee who will follow the trial which is expected to last until July, said the court proceedings would go some way to address a historical wrong, but did little to rectify the fact the many top Nazis had escaped justice. 
 
 Heubner said: “The open wounds caused by the non-existent justice system is an enduring scandal that has lasted since Auschwitz until today and caused huge indignation amongst the survivors. The fact that most perpetrators died without seeing the inside of a courtroom, with most of them continuing to live in the middle of society without being confronted with their guilt, is not something we can change. 
 
 “But it’s very important that these survivors can testify as witnesses now.” 
 
 The last Nazis 
 
 Former SS members Hubert Z, a 94-year-old farmer from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and 93-year-old Reinhold H, from North Rhine-Westphalia (their full names cannot be given for legal reasons) are to stand trial following investigations by state prosecutors in Schwerin and Dortmund respectively. Each stands accused of acting as an accessory to the murder of thousands of Auschwitz prisoners. Just as in the Gröning case, the men are accused of assisting the Nazi killing machine by serving the SS. Like Gröning, neither of them are known to have directly killed, but they were in the camp when at least 1.1 million Jewish people, as well as tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, and Sinti and Roma, were exterminated. 
 
 Hubert Z arrived at Auschwitz in 1943 and worked as a hospital orderly in the emergency medical services squadron of the SS, having joined the organisation voluntarily, at the age of 20. Having previously served at the front, he was granted a transfer to the less dangerous location of Auschwitz because all his brothers had been killed in action. In his capacity as a medic, he helped to “support the industrial scale mass killings” carried out at Auschwitz, according to the Schwerin state prosecutor’s charge sheet. Hubert Z denies the charges, saying he had no contact with prisoners, only members of the SS in need of medical attention. 
 
 
 
 Reinhold H was a guard in the main camp, and was a member of the SS Totenkopf division. He was responsible for overseeing the selection process of prisoners immediately following their arrivial to Auschwitz, according to the prosecutor. He stands accused of acting as an accessory to the murder of 170,000 prisoners. 
 
 
 
 State prosecutors said in February that they have opened an investigation into 93-year-old Hilde Michnia who served as a guard in the Bergen-Belsen and Gross-Rosen concentration camps and is suspected of forcing prisoners on an evacuation march in 1945 during which around 1,400 women died. A social worker from Lüneburg filed charges against her after seeing the Irish documentary Close to Evil in which an Irish survivor of Bergen-Belsen tries to meet her. Like Gröning, Michnia has done nothing to hide her past.
– Menachem Bodner doesn't remember the horrors he suffered as an experiment subject of Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. But he knows he had a twin brother, and deep down always believed he was alive somewhere. Now, thanks to help from a genealogist, the 72-year-old has proof his brother, Jolli, survived the camp, and he's enlisting the Internet to help find him, the Daily Beast reports. The search began when Ayana KimRon spotted a post from Bodner's partner's cousin on a genealogical message board, and found a Nazi record showing a pair of twins who were "identified as having been liberated at Auschwitz." After a host of leads turned out to be dead ends, KimRon created a Facebook page titled "A7734," Bodner's brother's tattoo number. Within a day a photo of the young Bodner had been shared 23,000 times (it's now up to almost 48,000), and racked up 1.13 million views. "I'm going to maximize the Internet," KimRon promises, with a Twitter account already up and a YouTube channel in the works. So far, there have been no leads to Jolli—but KimRon has found nearly 70 of Bodner's extended family members. "I was shocked," says Bodner, who lives in a suburb of Tel Aviv. "I thought that nobody would look for me. I had a dream to find someone. It made my dreams come true."