Eva Kor

Abstract

Holocaust survivor who advocated forgiveness. She was born on Jan 31, 1934, in Portz, Romania, and died with respiratory disease on July 4, 2019, in Kraków, Poland, aged 85 years. Eva Kor, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp, who with her twin sister Miriam endured brutal experimentation at the hands of Nazi physician Josef Mengele, likened forgiveness of her tormentors to “chemotherapy”. “Forgiveness is really nothing more than an act of self-healing and self-empowerment. I call it a miracle medicine. It is free, it works and has no side effects”, recalled Kor, who died in Poland on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She grew up in Portz, Romania, where Eva Mozes’ family were the only Jews. In 1944, when Kor and her sister were 10 years old, the family was sent to Auschwitz. The girls’ parents and two other siblings died in the concentration camp and the twins were subjected to inhumane experiments by Mengele. “Because we were twins, we were used in a variety of experiments”, Kor recalled. “Three times a week we’d be placed naked in a room, for 6–8 hours, to be measured and studied. It was unbelievably demeaning.” After one experimental injection, Kor remembered, she developed a high fever. “Dr. Mengele came in the next day, looked at my fever chart and declared that I had only two weeks to live. For two weeks I was between life and death but I refused to die. If I had died, Mengele would have given Miriam a lethal injection in order to do a double autopsy. When I didn’t die, he carried on experimenting with us and as a result Miriam's kidneys stopped growing. They remained the size of a child's all her life.” Miriam Zieger died in 1993 of bladder cancer believed to be linked to the torture. The Russians liberated Auschwitz in January, 1945, and the Mozes sisters eventually moved to Israel. There, Eva met Michael Kor who had also survived the Holocaust. The couple settled in Terre Haute, IN, USA. In 1978, Kor began speaking about her experiences at Auschwitz, and over the next few years attempted to contact other survivors of Mengele's abuses. Frustrated at the lack of response, she set up her own organisation and wrote to other survivors. “Finally I was able to find other twin survivors and exchange memories. It was an immensely healing experience.” In 1984, Kor and her sister founded CANDLES, Inc (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) through which they and their colleagues have found 122 other twins worldwide who were tortured by the Nazis. A decade later, Kor helped to open the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, which an arsonist destroyed in 2003, according to CANDLES, Inc. A new museum building opened in 2005. Patricia Heberer Rice, the Director of the Division of the Senior Historians at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, knew Kor and spoke with her at events marking the Holocaust. “She was a particularly good witness; very forthright and compelling. She never embroidered. Eva had a talent for telling what she saw at the time in a very nuanced and clear way”, Heberer Rice said. But her willingness to forgive Mengele and others, such as Nazi physician Hans Münch, was not universally applauded. “I witnessed her being heckled by other survivors”, Heberer Rice said. Yet Kor's message was always personal. “I don’t think she ever argued this for anyone but herself,” Heberer Rice said. “For her, this was a way of coping with her tragedy and getting on with her life.” Robert Enright, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and co-founder of the International Forgiveness Institute, knew Kor and said: “When you forgive, you don’t throw justice under the bus”. Enright added, “it does not mean condoning or even reconciling. You can forgive someone who keeps stealing your money but not lend them money when they ask again.” Kor received numerous awards for her advocacy of forgiveness, starting in 1985 with the Israeli Press’ News Woman of the Year. Last year she received an Honorary Doctorate in Public Service from DePauw University in Chicago. Kor wrote a book for students about her experiences in Auschwitz, titled Surviving the Angel of Death: The True Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz. For Kor, who is survived by her husband, her daughter Rina Kor, and her son Alex Kor, forgiving had generational benefits. “For most people there is a big obstacle to forgiveness because society expects revenge”, she wrote. “It seems we need to honour our victims but I always wonder if my dead loved ones would want me to live with pain and anger until the end of my life.”