As one of the last survivors of Josef Mengele’s infamous twin experiments at Auschwitz, Gyorgy Kun spent most of his life carrying a debt he could never repay.

Gyorgy’s story begins in the Hungarian village of Vállaj, where he was born on January 23, 1932, to Jewish parents Márton Kuhn, a farm manager, and his wife Piroska. His brother Istvan arrived eleven months later, a close sibling who bore a striking resemblance to Gyorgy

Their childhood unfolded normally until 1938, when Hungary began implementing anti-Jewish laws modeled after Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. Young Gyorgy was barred from grammar school, though his parents managed to enroll him in a local high school instead. The walk home became a nightmare, as he was often attacked by other children for just being Jewish.

A brief reprieve came in 1942 when Hungary’s leader attempted to distance the country from Hitler’s regime by installing the more moderate Miklós Kállay as prime minister. But the relief was temporary after Nazi forces occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. The Kun family was quickly evicted from their farm and forced into a nearby ghetto, then a brick factory, before being loaded onto trains bound for Auschwitz in May 1944.

Gyorgy, Istvan, and their mother were taken to face Mengele, the Nazi doctor known for his sadistic experiments on twins.

“He asked my mother one word,” György recalled in an interview with the Telegraph. “‘Zwillinge [twins]?’ My mother did not speak German, but instinctively she replied, ‘Ja’.”

The boys were immediately separated from their mother. They never saw her again.

“My last memory of my mother is that she is holding my hand and we are separated. We were simply torn apart: we, one way and she, the other. I had that picture with me a long time, and I know my brother did, too,” he said.

During registration, the brothers revealed their true birth dates, nearly destroying the lifesaving fiction their mother had created. Ernő Spiegel, a fellow Jewish prisoner who supervised the twin boys under Mengele’s order recognized the danger immediately.

Fully aware that the truth would send the brothers to the gas chambers and despite the danger to his own life, Spiegel falsified their registration forms, recording identical birth dates instead of the eleven-month gap. The deception held and the brothers received their tattoos in sequence: Gyorgy became A-14321 and Istvan A-14322.

Unlike most others, both boys survived until liberation. They were eventually reunited with their father, who had somehow survived Dachau. Yet Auschwitz never fully released its grip on Gyorgy who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments throughout his life.

Still, through it all he maintained a profound gratitude toward Spiegel, who had become more than a savior. Gyorgy remembered how Spiegel “led his surviving charges back home after the camp was liberated,” arranged for older boys to help younger ones find their way, and most importantly, gave them hope “that maybe, one day, life would be joyful again.”

Sadly, Gyorgy took his last breath last Wednesday, passing at the age of 93.

May his memory be forever a blessing.