EVA KOR - Here I am in Birkenau. The
closest place to hell on this earth. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany
invaded Poland. The attack unleashed a storm that had been gathering
for two decades. Germany’s defeat in World War I had left the country
humiliated, its economy shattered, providing an opportunity for a
radical-nationalist movement led by Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s
rhetoric blamed those who had supposidely weakened the nation.
Most of all, he blamed the Jews. He was determined to expell every Jew
in Germany, and eventually beyond, as the Nazis expanded into Austria,
Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. When the occupation of Poland brought
2 million Jews under Nazi control, the notion of expulsion
increasingly gave way to murder. Even in the most remote villages
of Europe, no Jew was safe. EVA - I was born in 1934 in Transylvania,
Romania, in a tiny village called Portz. We were the only Jewish family in the
village, and in the Mozes family there were six people: my father Alexander,
my mother Jaffa, my oldest sister Edit, my middle sister Aliz, and Miriam
and I were twins - very cute! And the nice thing about
being a twin, we always had each other so we
never felt lonely. We lived on a old-fashioned farm. It had
a big orchard with lots of fruit trees. I always remember being in the cherry
tree, and picking some juicy cherries, looking at the sky. And in 1940, I
was 6 years old, the Hungarians occupied our village and
everything changed. When Hungary allied with Germany,
a nightmare began for Jews in the country and its occupied territory. Eva
recalls the film she and Miriam saw, which depicted how to catch and kill a Jew.
Their schooldays became torture. The kids started calling us names,
Miriam and me, and “dirty Jews.” Then they began spitting on us, taunting
us and beating us over the face. The teacher
did nothing! In Dachau near Munich, the first
Nazi concentration camp was opened less than two months after Hitler became
German chancellor. As anti-semitic policies intensified, the number of
camps grew into the thousands. Increasingly they were used to detain Jews.
With the so-called Final Solution, the Nazis’ 1941 decision to annihilate
the Jews of Europe, a number of internment camps became killing centers.
Most of the murders were done by gassing. The corpses were buried in mass
graves or burned in crematoria. Auschwitz first opened in 1940,
but soon proved too small. So two years later, construction began on
a new camp just over two kilometers away. It would become the largest mass
murder site in human history. It was known as Auschwitz
II -- or Birkenau. EVA - They came with horses. And they
said, we have come to take you away. The streets were
lined with people. Nobody smiled.
Nobody said a word. Between May and July 1944, more
than 430,000 Hungarian Jews - half of the pre-war population —
arrived at Birkenau by cattle car. Railway tracks led directly into the
camp to deliver the prisoners within 100 meters of the main gas chambers. The
Mozes family was among the first to step down onto the freshly hardened concrete
of the unloading and selection platform. EVA - A Nazi was running in the
middle of the selection platform, very clearly yelling in
German, 'Twins! Twins!' He noticed Miriam and me and he
demanded to know if we were twins, and my mother said yes. At that
moment, another Nazi appeared from nowhere, pulled my mother to the
right. And I can see still as my mother's arms were stretching out towards
us, and she was pulled away. There was so much pain in her eyes. That is
the last image that I have of my mother. Most of the arrivals underwent a different
selection. Nearly 90 percent were immediately marched to the gas chambers.
Men and women deemed stronger were sent in the opposite direction, to a world
of starvation and brutal labor until they died
or were murdered. To the right to live,
to the left to die. In the Nazis' attempt to
propagate a perfect Aryan race, another group would be subjected to
medical experiments. Of greatest interest were sets of twins. They were set aside
in special barracks, separated by gender, and tattooed with a number on their arms.
Eva and Miriam Mozes became numbers A 7063 and A 7064. In the morning
they were awakened by a visit from the so-called Angel of Death, Dr.
Josef Mengele. EVA - One of the supervisors would be on
guard and shout, 'Mengele is coming!!!' Everybody straightened out
like little soldiers. He was at the cutting edge, as he thought
of it, of Nazi eugenics and race science. He would establish by working on human
beings in Auschwitz, on those twins, not only maybe unlock the secrets of twin
births, so that after the war every good German mother could have two German
children instead of just one, but unlock the secrets of how to engineer a race
that looked more like the master race. And that ambition overrode all
conscience and sense of morality. EVA - On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we
would march about a mile and a half to Auschwitz 1, where we would be placed
in a room, naked, for about 8 hours. They would measure every part of my
body, compare it to my twin sister, and compare it to charts. On Tuesday,
Thursday, and Saturday, we would be taken to another lab that I
call the blood lab. You could have about 30 kids in here at a
time. They had chairs with little arms like that, and we put our arms out. And
they tied this arm, and they tied this arm, and then they took lots of blood from
here, and lots of injections into here. The content of those injections, we didn't
know then, nor do I know them today. After one injection, Eva became
feverish and was taken to the hospital. Mengele determined she had only two weeks
to live, but Eva defied him. After a little more than a month she was back in
the barracks, and life as she knew it resumed. Experiments, starvation, stealing
food - surviving in a landscape of death. EVA - At times, that seemed
to be going on so long. And then, suddenly, it came to an end. By
January of 1945, it was clear the Nazis were on the brink of defeat, and most of
the Auschwitz prisoners had been force marched to other camps. Eva and
Miriam were among those left behind. On January 27, the
Russians came. EVA - There were lots of people; they were
all wrapped in white camouflage raincoats. I had no idea who they were, but that was
not important. One thing was important. They didn't look like the
Nazis, and that had to be good! The Russians were stunned by what
they found. Around 7,000 survivors - most nearly frozen, feeble, barely able
to move. Dead bodies littered the ground. FILM - There were 180 children among the
freed prisoners at Auschwitz, and they were now expected to overcome
the Auschwitz nightmare. The joy of liberation was tempered
by the terrible uncertainty of what had happened to their families.
But a flicker of hope remained. EVA - I wanted to see my home. It
was such a must. I could not go on anywhere without
seeing my home again. The journey home took nine arduous months.
Finally, a year and a half after being taken from their home,
they were back in Portz. EVA - So now we are finally heading home,
running down the hill. Hoping that somebody would be home, or
something good would happen there. We entered.
Nobody returned. Disappointment. Disappointment
and, and sadness, and you know, that's got to be, for an 11-year-old,
just terribly traumatic, and how do you
deal with that? EVA - Where do I go? What do we do?
The home that I dreamed about was only was the walls. Nobody who was
supposed to be there was there. The twins were taken in by their Aunt
Irena in a neighboring city where they lived for five years under communist rule.
Irena had also suffered devastating loss - her husband and son were
murdered in the Holocaust. In all 1.1 million people were murdered
at Auschwitz, 1 million of them Jews. Three thousand twins were subjected to
experiments. An estimated 200 survived. In 1950, two of those survivors,
Eva and Miriam Mozes, now 16, embarked for Israel
to start a new life. EVA - We were 3,000 people on a
ship sailing the Mediterranean Sea and we arrived June 19, arrived finally in
the Port of Haifa. It was early morning; the sun was rising over, above the
Mount Carmel. And 3,000 people stood up and sang the Hebrew
national anthem. Ten years later, Eva Mozes was
to arrive on yet another shore, as a newlywed, but still haunted
by Auschwitz. Always, Auschwitz. EVA - Memorial pledge. We, C.A.N.D.L.E.S.,
are the voices of the children saved from the ashes. We will not let the world
forget what happened here in Auschwitz. We will show our children where their
grandparents hugged us for the very last time. We will not rest until Dr.
Mengele is caught and brought to justice. During her decade in Israel, Eva attended
an agricultural school and served in the Army. Then she met an American
tourist. They had something in common. Michael "Mickey" Kor, a Jew from Latvia,
had been imprisoned in Buchenwald and other camps for nearly four years. He
was liberated by a U.S. soldier from Terre Haute, Indiana, and eventually moved
there after he learned that his parents had been murdered. He graduated from
Purdue University, became a U.S. soldier, and a pharmacist. While visiting
Israel, his life took another turn. It was a beautiful dream of a love
affair... that you have a violin playing behind you, and "Autumn
Leaves" playing on the piano. The early years in Indiana seemed idyllic.
A son was born, and then a daughter. Baseball games, birthday parties,
bike riding with picnic lunches. Under the surface, however,
a storm was raging. A storm Eva would only begin to
understand decades later. EVA - It was pain, a lot of pain.
And a lot of anger. From the start, Eva felt isolated in
Indiana. A young woman, separated from her twin for the first time, struggling
with the language, often on her own in a new world with two young kids, a
husband working double shifts, and neighbors who
couldn’t relate to her. She was made fun of, nobody
respected her, and I think she didn't feel a sense of
purpose, and a sense of value. But then, three decades after the war,
a miniseries in 1978 called Holocaust marked the first time the subject entered
the mainstream public consciousness. There's a cruel and ironic joke
about the docudrama The Holocaust: It had more impact than the original. Its
impact catapulted the Holocaust to the attention of not only the American
people, but also of the world. Eva Kor, among them. She called the
Terre Haute NBC affiliate to see if the show would contain archival
material. They said it wouldn't, but asked her for an interview. She
appeared on TV twice while the series was being broadcast and attracted a lot
of attention. It was transformative. Schools called, asking Eva to tell her
story. She did, and encountered questions about the Mengele experiments
that she couldn't answer. Searching for answers would
become a life-long mission. She was reclaiming her life.
Once she woke up and was like, 'Oh my god, there was a lot that happened
to me,' from that point forward, then she began to really
grow, really grow. Eva was determined to discover what
had been done to her and Miriam, what they had been injected with.
Especially Miriam. After she had experienced difficulties in her
pregnancies, her doctors discovered her kidneys had stopped growing when she
was 10 - while she was in Auschwitz. For Eva, the first step in the hunt was
clear: find other surviving twins. EVA - It was very, very important
- life-savingly important. In 1983, she attended the first major
national Holocaust memorial event, in Washington D.C., carrying a sign
identifying herself as a twin tortured by Mengele. She left disheartened that
hardly anyone had heard of the Mengele experiments, that amid all the ceremony,
very few survivors were asked to speak. She reached out to major newspapers,
magazines and television networks in the United States, imploring them to help her
find other Mengele Twins. No one replied. EVA - And guess what
- nobody cared. Then one day, she had an epiphany. If she
were to start an organization and name herself president, the media would be more
likely to listen to her. That was the birth of C.A.N.D.L.E.S. - Children of Auschwitz
Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. Around the same time, she persuaded
her brother-in-law in Israel to put an advertisement in a major newspaper
seeking other surviving twins there. After all that effort, she began to make
progress. Eighty twins in Israel came forward almost immediately. And then,
finally, she was contacted by a journalist. We got so many letters, which we
ignored, but there was a quality about Eva's note that totally grabbed me. And I
picked up the phone and called this woman, who I think she was a real estate
agent in Terre Haute, Indiana! And there began this extraordinary
journey - hers and mine - into this long ago world which everybody
had kind of swept aside. The call set off a series of events that
would shed new light on the Holocaust and have repercussions on Eva Kor’s life. While
Lucette Lagnado worked on her comprehensive story on the Mengele Twins, Eva had an
idea: On the 40th anniversary of their liberation, have twins return to the scene
of the crime. Make the world see them, hear them. It worked. When the twins
arrived in Birkenau on January 27, 1985 and when they followed up the
visit with a mock trial of Mengele in Yad Vashem,
Israel, the press was there. This weekend is the anniversary of the end
of a nightmare. The end of a death camp called Auschwitz. The end of the
unspeakable horrors committed by its chief medical officer, a Nazi named Josef
Mengele. The worldwide search for this war criminal was given new impetus today
by those who were his victims. That put it on the radar for the mainstream
media in a way that you couldn't have expected it. Josef Mengele is front
and center, and Eva and the twins are responsible for having
sparked that fire. The day the mock trial ended, the
United States Attorney General William French Smith ordered the
Justice Department to find Mengele. It became one of the biggest international
manhunts in history. Israel and West Germany joined in and rewards of
several million dollars were offered. It was revealed with great fanfare that
Josef Mengele's body had been found in a grave near Sao Paulo, Brazil. A preliminary
report stated that Mengele had drowned six years earlier, in 1979, while
swimming off a nearby beach, and that his skeleton had been authenticated "within
a reasonable scientific certainty." But the woman who helped initiate the hunt
was skeptical. Eva took to the airwaves. What is your reaction to the
reports that Dr. Mengele is dead? EVA - I do not believe it, because
it just doesn't make sense. She took out a second-mortgage on her home
to finance an $18,000 inquest on Mengele in Terre Haute. None of it made a ripple.
Though the Mengele findings were clearly labeled preliminary, the public
had moved on - case closed. EVA - Most of my battles were alone.
Nobody understood it. Maybe even today nobody understands it. But I couldn't give
up. I can't ever give up on the truth! In 1987, Eva Mozes Kor was at rock bottom.
She had few friends, a cause no one seemed to care about, and was treated
with scorn by the nation's biggest Holocaust organizations. In the fall of
that year, Eva flew to Israel to donate a kidney to her ailing sister. As Miriam's
condition continued to deteriorate, the fight to find Mengele, or at least his
files, took on an air of desperation. EVA - How fast we forget! Where is the
press?! Four years ago we were in this building - the world seemed to show us
that they cared. So fast they don't care anymore about a major Nazi
criminal that is running loose? The final report, conclusively stating the
body was Mengele’s, was not published until 1992, seven and a half years
after the investigation began. It included several key pieces of evidence
not used in the initial report, and was apparently clinched by a DNA match between
the body and Mengele's son, Rolf. It was a conclusion that Eva
continued to disagree with — questioning whether the
correct DNA was used. If they took the blood themselves from
him, and it was used in a DNA match, they might say afterwards, how do we know
it was done correctly once it was sent off? There's always a reason to still have that
doubt. By burying him, putting him six feet into the ground, by putting away
that ghost of Mengele, they put away so many years of this quest of finally
standing there in front of him and saying, 'I am the 10-year-old girl. Remember me
and my sister Miriam? We were 10 when you first took us. Guess what? You're this
old man sitting in front of me finally brought down, I'm a woman standing here to
tell you that I've survived and you failed. In 1993, Miriam Mozes died of cancer
related to her kidney problems. She was 59 years old. Because of the
Jewish practice of burying the body within 24 hours, Eva was
unable to attend the funeral. EVA - Miriam, the day I got the message
from Kutie, your husband, that you left this world, I was not prepared
to live in a world without you. Again, there was Auschwitz. All that she’d
experienced over the years: the isolation, harassment, rebirth, anger, accomplishment
and rejection always led back to Auschwitz. Now it had taken yet another toll. In
every way, it came back to Auschwitz. EVA - I, Eva Mozes Kor, a twin who survived
as a child Josef Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz 50 years ago, hereby give
amnesty to all Nazis who participated directly or indirectly in the murder
of my family and millions of others. I, Eva Mozes Kor, in my
name only, give this amnesty because
it's time to go on. It was the decision of a lifetime, which,
on the surface, came about almost by chance. Shortly after Miriam's death, Eva
was invited to a conference about medical ethics, accompanied by a peculiar request:
could she bring along a Nazi doctor. EVA - I said where on earth can I find
one of those guys? Last time I looked in the telephone book, they
were not advertising them. A couple of years earlier, Eva had taken
part in a German documentary that included a Nazi doctor called Hans Münch.
Eva got in touch with him and Münch agreed to be interviewed
at his home in Bavaria. EVA - I was
very scared. Eva had her own agenda, and was
disappointed when Münch said he never worked with Mengele and had
no idea where his files were. However, Münch
had more to say. EVA - Did you see
the gassing? Sure. That's
my problem. Münch agreed to document what he witnessed
- and to go to Auschwitz with Eva to present it in person. For months
Eva considered how to thank him. Then it hit her: Forgiveness. She would
forgive Dr. Münch for his crimes as a Nazi. She wrote him a letter and had it
edited by her speech professor. I remember in particular saying,
'OK, so, Münch; what about Mengele? What about all the other SS? Are you just
going to forgive Münch, because he's there? EVA - She said your problem is not with Dr.
Münch. Your problem is with Dr. Mengele. I went home, closed the door, picked up a
dictionary, made a list of 20 nasty words, which I read clear and loud to that
make-believe Mengele in my room. And then I said, 'In spite
of all that, I forgive you.' For her, that was the thing she
needed to do. Something was stuck. And whatever that was, I did
not sense that in her anymore after she went through
that act of forgiveness. I said, you're going to do what?
You're going to do what? And so on the 50th anniversary
of the liberation of Auschwitz, on January 27, 1995, Eva Mozes
Kor returned once again. This time armed not
with anger but peace. EVA - No more wars. No more gas chambers.
No more bombs. No more hatred. No more killing. And
no more Auschwitzes. But Eva’s moment of personal liberation
was not to everyone’s liking. How could she forgive someone that tortured
her personally? And tortured her sister - and her sister died because of it?
I'll never understand. Six million people died!
How could she forgive? EVA - Enough
is enough. Of all the bold acts
of Eva Kor’s life?. EVA - I am
healed inside. ...it was this forgiveness that formed her
legacy, and that is still debated today. EVA - Do I deserve to live free
of what Mengele did to me? And I declare with every
ounce of my being that I do. Most of all, Eva's choice to forgive is
about self-healing and self-empowerment - shedding the emotional and psychological
burden of what happened to her, and with that, the Nazis' control over her.
This way, she says, she was free to resume her
life without anger or pain. EVA - Anger is a seed for war.
Forgiveness, a seed for peace. Eva always made clear that it wasn’t
about forgetting - on the contrary, she fought to keep the memory of the
Holocaust alive, so it would never be repeated. This forgiveness had nothing
to do with religion; it was not for the perpetrator, nor for anyone else. It
is only for herself. Yet some questioned whether such a self-oriented undertaking,
even if therapeutic, could be considered true forgiveness. Others said that
especially in Judaism, forgiveness had to be earned, and that Nazis had
done nothing to that end. Look, I'm operating out of a deeply and
profoundly Jewish religious ethic. Christianity, in some of its
interpretations, has an easier view of forgiveness, because if Christ died for
our sins, then it's not that we have not sinned, but we are forgiven and grace
is available to us through Christ. We Jews are a little bit
more tenacious about it. Eva's son says he has issues with
his mother’s decision to forgive. And yet he's witnessed its effects,
on his mother, and on others. The big criticism is why does she have
to be so public with her forgiveness. And I do agree that I think it's very
selfish of my mother to do this. On the other hand, she's touched so
many more lives than she would've if she would have
kept it to herself. Amid all the objection and debate,
Eva Mozes Kor continued her mission. Three months after forgiving the Nazis,
Eva opened the CANDLES Museum in a small strip mall in Terre Haute. It remains the
only museum in the world specifically commemorating the twins in the Mengele
experiments, and advocating forgiveness. The museum is
dedicated to Miriam. EVA - We are a small museum, a
small place, with a big message. The message is: Let's
remove hatred and prejudice from our world. Let
it begin with me. "Tonight: It's a company
we all know ..." Two years after opening her museum, Eva
Kor filed a lawsuit against the German pharmaceutical Bayer, claiming it tested
its drugs on concentration camp inmates. The claim, along with others against
further German companies, helped lead to a $5 billion settlement established
by Germany that distributed money to thousands
of victims. EVA - They have benefitted.
They should pay restitution. She also released her first book.
She oversaw community projects. She pushed to get the Holocaust on the
curriculum of Indiana public schools. She became an active force
protesting genocide of all kinds. She spoke out about racial prejudice. And
as each year brought more people to her museum, the teacher learned something
herself: That from her new position, she had the power to
make lives better. EVA - I know it's some kind of idealistic
idea that I could, with my little idea of forgiveness, I could somehow help
heal the world. But if I help heal one single person, I'm already happy. The
other request that I have of you, is if someone doesn't quite fit in, help them
fit in. Accept them for who they are. You might help somebody
who desperately needs it. Forgive your worst enemy. It will heal
your soul, and it will set you free. Dylan Parent and Catrinna Wimsatt were both
victims of horrendous violent assault. They say that without Eva,
they wouldn't be alive today. Eva gave me forgiveness as an option,
as a path that I could take, as a method of healing. And it was something
that I thought was completely out of my power and out of my control,
and completely unattainable. And then she said forgive - not for
them, but for you. And it made all the difference. Just forgiving, like all
this weight on my shoulders just went away. And she did that for me, and it's the
biggest thing that anyone's ever done. Not even a tragic setback could
weaken her determination. "A little piece of history
is lost tonight." On November 18, 2003, the Candles
Museum was destroyed by arson. EVA - So much work and so
much love and so much care... It kicked off a movement. The
reconstruction of Eva’s museum put her back in the national spotlight. But this time
the public was far more sympathetic. Eva Kor, who survived the Holocaust and
the destruction of her CANDLES museum in Terre Haute, has vowed to rebuild. Her
sacrifice, and that of her husband Michael, ensures that those who may be exposed to
hate, intolerance and bigotry, will also be exposed to love, charity and
mutual respect. Eva and Michael, thank you for
being with us. Even some of those who remained
adamantly opposed to forgiving the Nazis began to respect the
force for good Eva was becoming. Please stand up and
welcome Eva Kor. What's Eva accomplished? She's increased
consciousness of the Holocaust. She's used it as the vehicle to combat racism and
prejudice, to argue for human rights and human decency, to educate a younger
generation. She's built an institution that looks like it's going to take off.
What a magnificent, contributional life. Over time, things began to change.
The state of Indiana, which hadn't been particularly welcoming
to the lonely and struggling immigrant was proudly proclaiming her as a one of its
own. A Jewish community, in which she'd long been an outcast, began seeing her
in a new light. And Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation memorialized her
with an interactive Hologram. - Do you think another
Holocaust is possible? EVA - I believe, unfortunately... And somewhere along the line, this woman
who had felt so alone, found something new. She knows she's not alone now.
She knows she has all of us. She knows she has thousands and thousands
of people who appreciate the struggle she's been through and what
she does for them and others. In 2017, at age 83, Eva Mozes Kor seemed
unstoppable. A video interview with BuzzFeed got more than 185 million views.
Speeches once in front of dozens, were now in front of thousands. Yet at
heart Eva remained the small-town woman she'd been for nearly 60 years. The
Kor family had been through a lot - like Mickey, their daughter Rina doesn't
like to talk about the Holocaust. But they've stuck together through it all.
And Eva's thrice-weekly lectures at her
museum remain a must. I see it every day in her. It doesn't
matter what she's going through. She needs this museum. She needs to be
here. She needs to do what she does. Yet once again, as always, there was
Auschwitz. She returned every year, leading tours, no longer to protest,
but to pay respect, to teach, to not let the world forget.
But the pain remained. EVA - If I let myself feel, I remember how
it was in the barracks. And it was not fun. But things changed. In her
later years, it was at Auschwitz that Eva Mozes
Kor felt most alive. When I come back here, I
don't come back as a victim. I come back as a victorious survivor.
We are free! Hope. That's what she offers. And
that's what the world needs. That's kind of the
beauty of Eva. EVA - We are really trying
to teach the world! We celebrate the fact that a
survivor gets given an award. I know Eva's being given awards. Wonderful.
And so she should. What we haven't actually done is turned round and said to people
like Eva, 'Thank you. Thank you in spite of the fact that you've had everything
taken from you, everything destroyed, that you've had no hope of justice
whatsoever personally, that you have pursued the truth relentlessly ... and
what's more, you then go on to say, I want you to learn to forgive one
another, because that will lead to greater kindness in our world. We should be
saying thank you. Never mind she has no right to forgive or - just
thank you for the struggle. I would just say, good work. Good
work, Eva. You are succeeding. I would say, 'Mom, I'm very proud of you.
You may think that you are not a good mother.
I beg to differ. She rose, and she lives, and she inspires,
and she loves, and she's mighty, and she's this force in so many
people's lives...She lives! She lives. Mom, I told our story. You are
the guiding light in my life. I sometimes ask myself, would
you be proud of me. I hope so. I hope that my message that
comes directly from you, it will maybe teach
the world to heal.
