Holocaust survivor who forgave her persecutors
Eva Mozes Kor 1934-2019
Eva Mozes Kor, who has died aged 85, was a survivor of Auschwitz and of Josef Mengele’s notorious experiments. She lost 49 of her relatives in the Holocaust, including both her parents and two of her sisters, yet in later life she insisted that she forgave its perpetrators. In 1995, she wrote a letter of forgiveness to a Nazi doctor named Hans Munch, after he agreed to testify about the workings of the gas chambers at Auschwitz; and in 2015, she was photographed embracing in court the so-called Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, Oskar Groening, after he accepted moral guilt for his part in the Holocaust. Other survivors were angry, but Mozes Kor said that she had come to realise that “forgiveness is the best revenge”.
Eva Mozes and her identical twin Miriam were born in Romania, into a farming family. Aged ten, they were deported from a regional ghetto to Auschwitz. At the camp’s train station, a guard identified them as twins and grabbed them from their mother. “[She] started screaming, and I remember her hand was still in the air and she was crying and I never even got to say goodbye to her.” While the rest of their family was sent to the gas chambers, Miriam and Eva were taken to the laboratory area where Dr Mengele conducted his inhumane experiments on twins. That day, Eva walked into a latrine and found the shrivelled corpses of three children on the floor. In the ensuing months, she had the blood drained out of her body until she fainted and was injected with unknown chemicals. Miriam later discovered that one of them had blocked the growth of her kidneys; she would die of kidney cancer in 1993.
In January 1945, Eva woke to find the guards had gone, said The Daily Telegraph. Later, some SS men drew up in a car and opened fire with a machine gun – at which point she fainted. When she came to, she was surrounded by bodies. She then heard the sound of explosions, as they blew up the gas chambers, followed by silence, until the Red Army arrived to liberate them. After that, she and Miriam emigrated to Israel, where she married Michael Kor, a fellow survivor with whom she moved to Indiana in 1960. She didn’t talk about the Holocaust until the 1970s, when she started to make contact with other Mengele twins. In 1984, she opened a museum in Indiana dedicated to their experiences. Then in the 1990s, she made contact with Dr Munch, hoping he might be able to tell her about Mengele, and discovered the “empowering” effect of forgiveness. After that, she decided to forgive all the Nazis, so that she could “let go of the pain”. Forgiveness, she said, is not the same as reconciliation, because “it has nothing to do with the perpetrator. Forgiveness has everything to do with the victim taking back their life.” She died on her annual visit to Auschwitz.