Eness is the f peace. I was ger a tragic er, I was free chwitz and I e of Mengele
wins visit camp in 1991; left, Eva in 2010
o educating others, as she began king in schools – eventually giving than 6,000 lectures. top of this, in 1984, she also ded the Children of Auschwitz Nazi dly Lab Experiments Survivors NDLES) charity. t Eva was far from over the traumas r past and when her sister died use of health complicas caused by Mengele’s riments, in 1993, Eva knew thing had to change. e said: “I was devastated. was the only one from family who was alive. I angry.” to make peace with the
Josef Mengele experimented on twins situation, she arranged a meeting with Dr Hans Munch, later that year.
Munch was a bacteriologist at Auschwitz. He also stood outside the camp’s gas chambers and then signed the death certificates.
But Eva said: “He greeted me with kindness, respect and consideration. I was blown away – a Nazi treating me
EVA ON THE HORRORS THAT GREETED HER AT AUSCHWITZ
with respect.” Munch, who died in 2001, also revisited the gas chambers with Eva and signed a document confirming that they had existed. And, to thank him, she wrote him a letter of forgiveness – which took her four months to finish.
She said: “I discovered that I had one power left in life. I could forgive the Nazis for what they did to me.”
Astonishingly, after this, Eva even attempted to forgive the evil Mengele who died in Brazil in 1979 aged 67 after having a stroke while swimming.
He fled to South America in 1949 and had been living under the name of his friend Wolfgang Gerhard but forensic
EVA ON BEING SEPARATED AT DEATH CAMP STATION teams and dental records later confirmed his identity. However, Eva pretended she was in a room with him, looked up every bad word she could find in the dictionary to describe him, before forgiving him as well.
She said: “I felt such freedom. I was no longer a tragic prisoner. I was free of Auschwitz and I was free of Mengele. Forgiveness is the seed of peace.”
Every day something terrifying happened. Within two weeks, Miriam and I had our heads shaved. Like all the twins in our barracks, we were infested with head lice.
Once a week, twins had the privilege of taking a shower. In the huge shower room, we took off our clothes and left them in a pile to be disinfected.
Later, I learned that the chemical used to disinfect our clothing, Zyklon B, was one of the three chemicals used to gas people to death at Auschwitz.
The gas, mixed with burning flesh and bones, created the stench I had noticed the first day. It is not a smell a human can ever forget.
Every morning after roll call, Mengele came to our barracks for inspection. Smiling, he called us meine Kinder – my children. I was terrified of him.
Even in those days, I knew he did not care about us like a real doctor.
On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, we went to the blood lab. I remembered wondering, “How much blood can I lose and still live?”
Meanwhile, a different doctor gave me an injection of something in my right arm. He stuck five needles in without removing the first one. What was he shooting into my remaining blood?
I hated these injections. But I refused to cry out in pain because I did not want to let the Nazis know they were hurting me.
On our way back to our barracks, Miriam and I did not talk about the injections. I took those injections as the price we had to pay to survive: we gave them our blood, our bodies, our pride, our dignity and in turn they let us live one more day.
I cannot remember a single twin who did not co-operate.
DISEASE
In those days we didn’t know what the experiments were for or what we were injected with. Later, we found out that Mengele gave some twins dangerous, lifethreatening diseases such as scarlet fever, then followed them with injections of something else to see if it cured the disease. Some injections were attempts to change the colour of eyes.
Older girls, many years after we were all liberated, told us Mengele had taken them to a lab and given them a transfusion of blood from a boy, and had transfused their blood into the bodies of boys.
He wanted to discover a way to change girls into boys and boys into girls. Death and danger were never far away. One day when we were outside, a cart of dead bodies rolled by. We ran to the fence to see if we recognised any of the corpses.
One girl cried out, “Mama! It’s my mama!” and burst into tears.
At that moment, I realised that maybe our mother had also gone by on a cart of bodies; we just hadn’t seen her. I could not think about Mama, Papa or our older sisters any more. I had to worry about Miriam and myself. I had to repeat to myself over and over:
Just one more day.
Just one more experiment. Just one more injection.
Just please, please, don’t let us get sick.
On the filthy floor of the room were the scattered corpses of three naked girls
Looking back at my mother I did not know I would never see her again
The Twins of Auschwitz: The inspiring true story of a young girl surviving Mengele’s hell, by Eva Mozes Kors, is published by Monoray, £7.99, www.octopusbooks.co.uk