Holocaust survivor recounts life in a Nazi death camp and her path to forgiveness

By Jennifer Ragusa
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer

An 84-year-old Holocaust survivor told a group at Loyola University last week that she learned to forgive her Nazi tormentors, even those who performed gruesome experiments on her and her twin sister in the 1940s.

Eva Mozes Kor said that while she was at the Auschwitz death camp during World War II, she was injected with unknown substances that made her sick and was forced to stand naked for hours while the notorious German physician Josef Mengele measured every part of her body.

After one experiment, Kor recalled, she became extremely sick and was left for dead. She still has vivid memories of crawling on the floor saying, “I must survive.”

“Dying was easy, surviving was a full-time job,” Kor said.

Kor’s lecture was divided into two parts: how she survived and the lessons she has learned.

Kor said that she and her family were the only Jewish family living in a small village in Transylvania, Romania, in 1940. Once the Hungarian army took control, life for the Jewish people became increasingly difficult, she said.

Despite being only 6 years old, Kor said she was aware of the unfolding persecution and told her father that life elsewhere in Romania would be better. However, her family never moved, and in 1944, they were taken to a ghetto and eventually Auschwitz in a cattle car.

“I have a theory that children as young as 5 are much smarter than we think,” Kor said during the Oct. 26 lecture.

The Kor sisters were saved from immediate execution because they were twins, Kor said. She said Mengele, the head physician at Auschwitz, pulled aside twins to perform inhumane experiments on them.

Kor said she was part of two different experiments.

Kor, her sister and roughly 24 to 25 other pairs of twins were taken to Mengele where they would stand naked for eight hours at a time. Mengele would measure every inch of Kor’s body in comparison to her sisters. Kor said that this was a demeaning process.

Another experiment consisted of Kor’s blood being taken at large amounts. She was also injected with rumored germs, diseases and drugs. Kor said that to this day, she does not know what specifically was injected into her body.

Kor said prisoners at Auschwitz could only survive through pure luck or an unbelievable will to live.

Kor said she learned many lessons while being held by the Nazis.

First, she said one should never give up on themselves or their dreams. She also recognized the pain and suffering that prejudice can inflict on other human beings.

Kor also stressed the need to forgive your worst enemy and how such forgiveness will set you free from being a victim. War starts with anger, she said, while peace starts with forgiveness.

She recounted the day in 1995 when she had returned to Auschwitz with a former SS physician, Dr. Hans Munch, to obtain an official, signed document on what happened in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

She pretended that Mengele was standing in front of her and she said to him, “In spite of everything, I forgive you.” That statement, she said, set her free.

“If you asked me 23 years ago if I could forgive the Nazis, I would have said to find a good psychiatrist,” Kor said. “I had the power to forgive.”