Fate of Twins

Martha and Miriam Rosenthal - Jewish twins born on Hitler's birthday April 20, 1933 experience a wonderful childhood during the 1930's in their upper-class neighborhood of Berlin-Nikolassee. Despite their parents' fears while witnessing the alarming march toward Nazification, their life seems manageable until their sudden deportation. Upon the twins' arrival at their death camp, the fact that they were identical twins was the key to escaping their fate during the Holocaust. After the war they were made welcome in the United States like many fellow German countrymen. However, some of these countrymen were implicated in Nazi Germany's war related research - from planes to rockets, but also including horrific human experimentation on twins. Along with the growth of U. S. science and the advances in space and aeronautical engineering, national pride increased. Seemingly, without effort, German immigrants assimilated themselves into the general U. S. population, independent of the fact of which side they belonged to during the Third Reich. The twin sisters start a normal life in the Midwest of the U. S. after the war. Their will power helped them to shape their lives as positively as one could expect. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Martha and Miriam felt motivated to return to their city of birth to revisit their former neighborhood if only to see whether they can find inner peace in a country that was the host to cruelty and anti-Semitism for 12 years. Their memories of their happy childhood in Berlin's scenic Nikolassee district accompany them throughout their visit, 50 years after they were deported to a concentration camp in the east.