I turned eighteen on a Sunday in September 1978, when the infamous German angel of death landed next to us on Broadway Boulevard in Yonkers, New York, as we went on our way to have a Chinese dinner for my birthday. 

Our 1965 red Chevrolet Impala, sheathed in steel like a Sherman tank, was ancient compared to every other car we passed on the road that evening, though it still had enough American energy and spunk to wage an attack on the recently minted yellow Volkswagen Beetle idling beside us at the stop light.

Dad was a stoic driver, dying from a slowly growing tumor; mom, quiet in the back seat, worn down from taking care of my ailing father.  Both too old, too infirm, and too tired to capture or kill a Nazi, even one as notorious as the malignant evil we encountered while cruising down a tranquil suburban street in the purple twilight of that fading summer.

I knew the history of Josef Mengele.  With a medical degree, his education was not used to heal, salve, or save, but instead to torment, torture and murder, mostly Jews, during World War Two.  He had successfully evaded capture at the conclusion of that war. In the three decades that followed, he was an international fugitive. How this wanted war criminal, then believed to be hiding in South America, came to be in the car next to us was not a question for that moment.

We were just a nondescript family in an old, beaten up car. Next to us, three imputed Nazis in a shiny foreign car.  For whatever cosmic reason, our two worlds intersected at a stop light, destinies of life and death momentously colliding. There were no other cars around us as our two cars waited for the light to turn.

Two formidable, Teutonic looking bodyguards seemingly guarded Mengele. Dressed in dark suits, they seemed absurdly hunched over the dashboard of their diminutive German made Beetle. Despite this awkward posture, their buzz haircuts endowed them with a certain aggressive militaristic countenance.  These were the type of men easily envisioned in death-head capped, crisp black SS uniforms. I sensed the two Nazis in front were furtively armed with handguns, concealed beneath their suit jackets.   

The old man in the back seat was erect, presenting an officious military profile: unabashed, defiant, aristocratic.  He never turned toward us. In the small confines of the car, he kept his face foreword; chin arrogantly high, too condescending to consider any threat, especially not one from a scrawny teen with two elderly parents.  Despite his age, he appeared robust, with white hair thick on the top of his head, neatly combed back. That summer a recent photo of Mengele, who just had his Paraguayan citizenship revoked, was in the newspapers. In my mind, the photo corresponded with the stern visage of the man in the back seat.  

Before that moment, nor in the years since, I never experienced proximity to metaphysical evil; a sinister presence so manifest that its malevolence was perceptible on the skin. The hair on my arms bristled, like a physiological response to some kind of satanic static emitting from the car next to us.  The intense, double-barreled stare directed at us from the two men in front and the indifferent demeanor of the old man in back seemed suspended in time. With this mutual exchange of inimical scrutiny, we waited, paused on the precipice of some physical action or for the light to become green lit.

The driver of the car reached into his jacket, prepared to extract a weapon, so I thought. To secure the Impala on the Bronx streets, my father used an adjustable iron rod, curved at both ends, about four feet long that braced and locked the steering wheel to the brake. This crude but potentially lethal instrument lay at my feet, on the front passenger side.  I reached down to grab it. I could envision smashing their car, cracking the heads of the two bodyguards and victoriously capturing Mengele. On my eighteenth birthday, I felt impervious to bullets. As I reached down for the steel club, their engine throttled loudly and the Volkswagen sped through the red light.  I vividly remember the terse conversation in our car.

“Those are three Nazis in the car.  I think Mengele is in the back seat,” I said, as I turned toward my parents. I didn’t need to elaborate.

“I felt they were Nazis too!” mother exclaimed from the back seat.

“Yes, they were Nazis,” father said with succinct disgust, but not shock.

All three of us had the same palpable sense. 

“The hair on my arms is standing up,” I observed to my parents.

“My hair too; I felt it. I felt cold shakes,” said mother shrilly, in horror.

“I could feel the chill from them,” said dad nonchalantly, as if discussing the weather. 

“Those men are Nazis and that’s Josef Mengele in the back seat. We need to chase him.”  I implored.

“I’m done chasing Nazis,” dad firmly stated as the light turned green, and he slowly accelerated the Chevy through the intersection.

“You were stationed in Fort Lauderdale during the war.  I’m certain that is Mengele. We need to get the car’s license at least,” I rebuked and urged.

“I am too old and too sick to chase anyone,” was his nonplussed response.

Their Volkswagen vanished in the distance, blocks beyond us.  We headed on to the Chinese restaurant for dinner and sat down to eat as if the entire episode was a dismissible, collective delusion. While feasting on eggrolls, fried rice, tangy chicken and barbecued ribs, we considered a sighting that dampened our mood.  We mused in dispassionate conversation, over sumptuous cuisine and Szechuan aromas, that it was an erroneous inference, a folly of projected phobia and irrational imagination.

Unspoken over dinner was my thought that the villainous, almost supernatural, appearance of Mengele in the car next to us was not entirely hallucinatory, but a conjuring wrought from subliminal fear and frustration over the cancer consuming my father and the dire condition of our fragile family. In an audacious moment, armed with a hefty metal weapon, I felt empowered to act for countless victims; I was powerless against the implacable growth buried in my father’s chest.

Following my father’s death, respected international news services ran stories asserting that the Nazi fugitive Mengele was indeed seen by multiple witnesses in Yonkers, New York in the fall of 1978.  His Westchester residence — the alleged hideout — not far from the Chinese restaurant. One major tabloid published a photo of the Mt. Kisco, N.Y. home he was reportedly using, owned by a subsidiary of his family’s agricultural firm in Germany.  The timing and proximity of other witness’s sightings made our encounter credible, if not validated in my mind. The year following our sighting, as a still-elusive fugitive, Mengele reportedly died while recreationally swimming in Brazil — a seemingly idyllic demise that drowned with him any true, punitive justice for those he mutilated or murdered.

With four decades elapsed, I can reflect upon that pivotal moment when I could have perhaps captured, or killed, one of the last century’s most notorious war criminals, an absolute embodiment of ethereal evil: A man responsible for metastasizing cruelty and death, a vicious cancer upon humanity itself, in a World War that ended only with an effulgent bomb blast of atomic radiation.

For those with an aching void in the spiritual soul, we seek a life infused with moral meaning and residual, righteous purpose. Justice is an envious, virtuous legacy, granted by so many, and for some at their own mortal expense. But for those like me, who will leave no progeny behind, we are unsure of our existential bequeathment to humanity. We ponder our purpose while we await the inevitable fate that will befall us all in some form, benign or not.

Of course, I could not know at eighteen what purpose I was to fulfill or fail.   While Mengele’s bodyguards and their bullets might have cut me down and added another to their millions slaughtered, I can now retrospectively measure my mortality against all I might have lost that day. In the imprecise calculus of whether a life has been well lived, I regretfully wish, in the random convergence of our paths, I had intrepidly acted.

That was the thing about evil back then, you could be a bystander, or you could reflexively take action,  seizing a moral imperative in an inspired moment, hoping your instinct is right about what you think you see and feel, and maybe, in some small way, altering humanity for the better. Of course, that was 1978. Today, with technology, you can just facilely capture any evil before you on a phone, post it to the internet, and wait for the world to react, if it does at all,  maybe creating a reprieve from the cancer around us or within that can slowly kill us.    

– Barry Ziman

Author’s Note: “Capturing Mengele” is based upon a true experience in the time and place described.