But this bond, while a source of strength, is also their greatest vulnerability. In Auschwitz, the girls’ ability to comfort and sustain each other helps build their resilience. I would take the sad, the past, the good.” Pearl quickly makes a plan to divide up the responsibilities of life between them: “Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. They have a tight bond, are deeply intuitive, and resolve to operate as one. Stasha and Pearl resist Mengele’s attempts to separate them. One twin might be injected with a disease, or have a limb or organ removed, while the other serves as the control. He collects twins and triplets in a human “zoo” and subjects them to sadistic experiments in the name of his genetic research. With their blond hair, the girls are at first mistaken for mischlinge, the word the Nazis used to describe people of mixed Aryan and Jewish descent, but what ultimately saves them from the gas chamber is the fact that Mengele prizes multiples. “He drew us out, made us turn for him, and had us stand back to back so he could appreciate the exactitudes of us,” says Stasha. The novel opens with identical twins Pearl and Stasha arriving at the concentration camp, where they are selected and inspected by infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. And the result is at once marvelous and strange. Few authors would have the nerve to spin an uplifting fable out of the true story of two twelve-year-old girls who were tortured and maimed at Auschwitz.
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