Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

Kalman Braun had 4 siblings, one was a twin sister.
His father and two of his brothers died, when he was a child.

In 1943, Kalman Braun was sent to study in a yeshiva for 2 years.

Kalman Bar On was separated from the others, and taken to the Twins Block, where he met a dwarf named Ludovit 'Leush' 'Uncle Lajos' Feld, who was Kalman's distant cousin.
They looked out for each other from then on, sharing the same bench and blanket.
Ludovit Feld cites: "Dr. Mengele and his people experimented on me because I was a dwarf. It was agonizingly painful. Because of my artistic talent, I was ordered by Mengele himself to draw the twins and other dwarfs. Mengele also loved to have his portraits drawn by me regularly."
Kalman Bar On and Peter Grunfeld cite: "After the liberation, Ludovit Feld, one of the ten dwarfs in Mengele's collection, returned to his Czechoslovakian home-town of Kosice, where he resumed his artistic career and became one of his country's renowned painters and art teachers."
"Ludovit Feld died in May 1991. A black marble tombstone in the Jewish cemetery of Kosice bears his full Hebrew name in Hebrew letters."

Kalman Braun was put to work in the guardroom, and took advantage of opportunities to hide food scraps, which he shared with his cousin 'Leush'.
He was subjected to medical experiments, and received numerous injections.

In July, 1944, Kalman Braun learned that his mother and sister, Yehudit, had been transferred to the barracks next to his, and he began to throw food to them over the fence.

During the death marches, Kalman Braun hid for a week under a bunk, until, on January 27, 1945, he was liberated by the Red Army.
He wandered for months until he found his sister, Yehudit.
Their mother had died before the liberation.

Kalman Bar-on and Leopold 'Lippa' Lšvi Lowy, both twins, spent months sharing a bunk in Auschwitz-Birkenau, while they were subjected to probes, tests and experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele.
Leo Lowy, one of approximately 3,000 Jewish twins forced to undergo experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau, was the subject of a Canadian film, Leo's Journey: The Story of the Mengele., directed by Lowy's son, Richard.