Auschwitz survivor finally reveals why he fears doctors
When Yitzhak Ganon, 85, came around from the anaesthetic at the hospital near Tel Aviv, he was informed that he had only one kidney.
"I know," he replied. "The last time I saw the other one it was pulsating in the hand of Josef Mengele. He was a doctor too."
Mr Ganon revealed to his stunned family why he had never visited a doctor since he was freed from Auschwitz death camp in January 1945. None of them knew of his suffering there at the hands of the infamous Mengele.
A Greek Jew, Mr Ganon was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, along with his mother and father and five brothers and sisters.
His father died en route, and his mother and siblings were gassed within hours of arrival. But he was chosen by Mengele, the SS doctor who met every transport that arrived so he could pick human guinea pigs for his experiments.
"He cut into me, without drugs," said Mr Ganon. "The pain was indescribable. I felt every slice of the knife.
"Then I saw my kidney pulsating in his hand. I cried like a madman. I cried out the prayer, 'Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one…'
"And I prayed to die, that I might not suffer this agony any more."
But Mengele, whose quest was eventually to clone perfect supermen for his Führer, had not finished with Mr Ganon.
"After the operation, I was given no painkillers and put to work," he said. "I cleaned up after the other bloody operations carried out by Mengele."
Six months later, Mengele called for him again. He was immersed in a tub of freezing water and intermittently inspected by Mengele, who said he wanted to check on how his lungs were functioning.
"Then I was selected for gassing because my body was no longer any use to them," he said.
Mr Ganon was the 201st man sent to the gas chambers one morning – but it was full after 200. "That saved my life," he said.
TOP NAZIS FEARED A HUMBLE TRIP TO THE DENTIST
HE ORDERED the deaths of millions in the extermination camps, invaded countries and instigated a brutal rule of terror enforced by his Gestapo and the Schutzstaffel (SS).
But if there was one thing Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, pictured, could not face, it was a trip to the dentist.
He once insisted his dentist draw out simple root-canal work over eight days because he "couldn't stand the pain", while he had "terribly bad breath, abscesses and gum disease".
These and other fascinating details about the Führer – and other top Nazis whom dentist Johannes Blaschke counted among his patients – are revealed in a new book out in Germany entitled Dentist of the Devil by Menevse Deprem-Hennen.
Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe chief who founded the dreaded Gestapo in 1934, was such a coward that Mr Blaschke noted: "He cried before he even got in the chair."