Holocaust Survivor Yitzhak Ganon's Kidney Was Removed by Josef Mengele

(Dec. 15) -- Yitzhak Ganon avoided doctors like the plague for 65 years. It was only after open-heart surgery last month in a hospital near Tel Aviv that he explained why.

The 85-year-old Israeli's only previous operation had been an unspeakably horrific one performed by the most notorious doctor in history: Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death" of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

As he told the Jerusalem correspondent of the German magazine Der Spiegel, Ganon and his family were lighting the Sabbath candles at their home in Northern Greece on March 25, 1944, when an SS officer and a Greek policeman arrived and told the family "we should get ourselves ready for a big trip." His father died in transport before the rest of the family arrived at Auschwitz, where his mother and five of his seven siblings were murdered in the gas chambers.

Josef Mengele was never captured or tried for the gruesome experiments he performed at Auschwitz.

The travails of Ganon were only beginning. He was taken to the Auschwitz hospital, where he was tied down to an operating table before Mengele, using no anesthetic, sliced into him and took out one of his kidneys. "I saw the kidney pulsing in his hand and cried like a crazy man," Ganon told Der Spiegel. "I screamed the 'Shema Yisrael.' I begged for death, to stop the suffering."

Ganon said he later had to clean up after Mengele's operations in the Auschwitz hospital, and was once forced to spend the night in ice water, ostensibly to test his lung function.

Ganon's story may be one of the last to surface in the catalog of sadistic atrocities committed by Mengele, who was never brought to justice for his gruesome experiments in Auschwitz on gypsies and Jews. Mengele lived in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil until his death at age 67 while swimming in Brazil.

Since he came to Israel in 1949, Ganon told no one -- least of all doctors -- what he'd suffered. "Whenever he was sick," his wife, Aruva, told Der Spiegel, "even when it was really bad, he told me it was just fatigue."