Eva Kor was victim to some of the most heinous crimes of all time at the hands of the Nazi regime and the infamous Dr Mengele.
Yet the Auschwitz survivor forgave her torturers, saying: “If I had discovered forgiveness sooner, I would have had that 50 years of my life. Forgive. See the miracle that can happen.”
Growing up, Eva lived a happy life with her father, Alexander Mozes, her mother, Jaffa, older sisters, Aliz and Edit and her twin, Miriam.
They were the only Jewish family in the tiny village of Portz in Romania and worked as landowners and farmers.
However, in 1941, the village became occupied by the Nazi armed guard.
And four years later, when Eva was 10, the family were transported to Auschwitz in a cattle truck with no food or water for 70 hours.
And as Eva and Miriam stood in burgundy dresses on the station platform, their lives changed for ever and their incredible story is now being told in a new book, The Twins of Auschwitz.
“The Nazi guard spotted me and my identical twin sister Miriam clinging to my mother,” Eva recalled before she died, aged 85, in July last year.
“He tore us from my mother’s arms and led us away. I remember looking back at my mother. I did not know at that time that I would never see her again.”
The Nazis took an interest in Miriam and Eva as they were twins – the perfect subjects for the horrific medical experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was led by the Angel of Death, Josef Mengele, who exposed 1,500 sets of twins to disease, disfigurement and torture.
When they first arrived, Eva and Miriam were stripped naked and every part of their body was then measured in what Eva described as a “horrible and humiliating” process.
Eva recalled: “On the filthy floor there were the scattered corpses of three girls. Their bodies were naked and their eyes were wide open. It was a horrifying look. I had never seen anybody dead before.”
And from that point, things continued to get much worse...
She said: “Three times a week we went to the blood lab. There we were injected with germs and chemicals, and they took a lot of blood from us.”
Eva once became so ill that doctors warned her that she only had two weeks to live. But she was determined not to die. She said: “If I died, Miriam would have been given a lethal injection so they could crack open our bodies and compare the autopsies.”
Luckily, both Eva and Miriam survived and were liberated on January 7 1945, by the Soviet Army.
Yet devastatingly, the twins then discovered that their parents and older sisters had been killed.
So, in 1950 they emigrated to Israel, where Eva met American Michael Kor, who was also a holocaust survivor.
The couple married in 1960 in Tel Aviv before starting a new life in the United States and having two children, Alex and Rina. And Eva dedicated her life to educating others, as she began speaking in schools – eventually giving more than 6,000 lectures.
On top of this, in 1984, she also founded the Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors (CANDLES) charity.
But Eva was far from over the traumas of her past and when her sister died because of health complications caused by Mengele’s experiments, in 1993, Eva knew something had to change.
She said: “I was devastated. She was the only one from the family who was alive. I was angry.”
So, to make peace with the situation, she arranged a meeting with Dr Hans Munch, later that year.
Munch was a bacteriologist at Auschwitz. He also stood outside the camp’s gas chambers and then signed the death certificates.
But Eva said: “He greeted me with kindness, respect and consideration. I was blown away – a Nazi treating me with respect.”
Munch, who died in 2001, also revisited the gas chambers with Eva and signed a document confirming that they had existed. And, to thank him, she wrote him a letter of forgiveness – which took her four months to finish.
She said: “I discovered that I had one power left in life. I could forgive the Nazis for what they did to me.”
Astonishingly, after this, Eva even attempted to forgive the evil Mengele who died in Brazil in 1979 aged 67 after having a stroke while swimming.
He fled to South America in 1949 and had been living under the name of his friend Wolfgang Gerhard but forensic teams and dental records later confirmed his identity. However, Eva pretended she was in a room with him, looked up every bad word she could find in the dictionary to describe him, before forgiving him as well.
She said: “I felt such freedom. I was no longer a tragic prisoner. I was free of Auschwitz and I was free of Mengele. Forgiveness is the seed of peace.”
