National Post (National Edition)
Auschwitz survivor forgave her Nazi captors
She and twin sister were used in experiments
Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor who lost 49 family members in the Holocaust but angered many fellow victims of the Nazis with her willingness to forgive her persecutors, has died.
She was 85.
In 2015 Kor surprised a German court when she publicly embraced Oskar Groening, a former SS guard known as the “bookkeeper of death,” after he was convicted of complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews.
When he was given a four-year jail sentence, she objected, arguing that instead of being left to rot he should have been forced to speak publicly about his experiences to help counter the claims of Holocaust deniers.
However 49 of the other co-plaintiffs made it clear that Kor was speaking only for herself.
Kor gave talks, appeared in documentaries and wrote several books about her experiences. She led annual tours to Auschwitz, and it was during one such visit that she died in Krakow, Poland, on July 4.
Kor and her identical twin sister Miriam were born at Port, Romania, on Jan. 31, 1934 to Jewish farmer parents. The twins had two older sisters and were 10 years old in 1944 when they and their family were deported from a regional ghetto and taken to Auschwitz.
“As we were holding on to my mother, a Nazi came running, yelling at us in German shouting ‘ Twins! Twins!’ ... Another Nazi came over and pulled my mother to the right while the other one pulled me and my sister to the left.
“My mother 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. I didn’t realize that would be the last time I would ever see her.”
That night the twins learned that the rest of their family had died in the gas chambers.
The girls had been spared to serve as guinea pigs for Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz physician who conducted gruesome experiments, many of them on twins, with mostly lethal results.
The girls were subjected to a range of experiments. Eva was regularly drained of blood until she fainted in an experiment designed to establish how much blood a person could lose and still live. She was injected with chemicals, the content of which she never discovered. Later the girls discovered that had one of them died, the other would have been killed with an injection to the heart so that Mengele could carry out a “comparative autopsy” on them.
In 1984 Eva founded Candles (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors) and helped set up a Holocaust museum near her home. In the early 1990s, however, a rift developed between her and some other surviving Mengele twins because of her willingness to forgive.
The turning point was a meeting in 1993 with Hans Munch, another Auschwitz physician and a friend of Mengele. “I found out that he was a real human being and a very nice man,” she recalled. “I really liked him and that was a very strange feeling. He said the nightmare he lived with every single day of his life was watching the people dying in the gas chambers ... I asked if he would go with me to Auschwitz in 1995 to sign a document saying what he did at the ruin of the gas chamber in the company of witnesses, and he said yes. Afterwards I decided to give him a letter of forgiveness.”
The discovery that she had the capacity to forgive was “tremendously empowering” and she decided to extend her forgiveness to all Nazis, including Mengele.
“Forgiveness,” she explained, “has nothing to do with the perpetrator. Forgiveness has everything to do with the victim taking back their life. I don’t have to deal with the whole issue of who did what to me — and how on earth am I going to punish them and make them pay for it?”
She is survived by her husband, Michael Kor, and their son and daughter.
The Daily Telegraph