Tenenbaum grew up near the city of Minsk in Belarus. Her father was German, and she was raised in the Jewish faith. When she was sixteen years old, she became a prisoner at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, where she observed German doctors, including Josef Mengele, experimenting on prisoners. Occasionally, when the Germans made scientific errors, she would correct them, and discovered that she had a vocation for science. Eventually, the Germans put her to work assisting in their infamous medical experiments. Tenenbaum considered the German experiments to be useless. While the rest of her family was killed, she survived the concentration camp, likely due to her helpfulness to the doctors, which had earned her the nickname "Das WunderkindFile:Icon sic.png."