Holocaust survivor visits Union

From atrocity and tragedy comes forgiveness and healing.

Holocaust survivor Eva Kor’s message is not always popular, but she is determined to raise awareness and understanding. She will speak in the Indiana Memorial Union’s Alumni Hall today about her survival and answer questions.

“Just to talk about and remember what happened, I don’t think is enough,” she said. “We have to remember with a purpose, and the number one purpose to remembering is to heal.”

Union Board Lectures Director and sophomore Erika Hall said in addition to being a powerful speaker and one of a dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, Kor will speak just before Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 11.

Kor and her sister, Miriam, were part of the now-infamous Mengele twin experiments, in which Dr. Josef Mengele tortured approximately 3,000 children — 1,500 sets of twins — imprisoned in the camp. Miriam and Eva survived, but many did not. In 1978, Kor began wondering what happened to the other surviving Mengele twins and in 1984 founded Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experi­ments Survivors, or CANDLES. The museum is in Terre Haute, where Kor has made her home since the ’60s.

“There’s a variety of responses to the Holocaust,” said Jeffrey Veidlinger, director of the Jewish Studies Department, including anger, sadness and, of course, forgiveness.
“Different people take different messages from the Holocaust,” he said. “Different people take different lessons out of the experience.”

He said the effects of the Holocaust, physical and emotional, have taken tolls for decades.

“There are long-term effects for everyone who survives that kind of thing,” Veidlinger said, adding that the Menegele experiments in particular are “representative of the evil” of the Holocaust. “Really, I think it was just sheer cruelty.”

Kor said speaking to young people is especially important to a changing society.
“Older people always seem to think they know everything,” she said. “They are very set in their ways.”

She said younger generations are eager to learn.

“You really have difficulty re-educating old people,” she said. “We want to repair the world.”

Kor said she has three rules to live by.

“Never give up, not matter how hard your life is,” she said, adding that she never would have survived had she given up.

The second lesson deals with prejudice and understanding — how people deal with prejudice today and how it made a travesty like the Holocaust possible.
Lesson three is forgiveness.

“Forgiveness is extremely valuable for every human being, young or old,” she said, because everyone has experiences “that bruise our souls, or scars it.”

“Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” a film about her life and struggle to overcome what she endured, won the Crystal Heart Award at the 2006 Heartland Film Festival. Kor has also penned several books, including “Surviving the Angel of Death: the Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz” and “Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr. Mengele’s Twins.” Each spreads Kor’s forgiveness.

“By forgiving, we are reclaiming our own power, which is very liberating,” she said. “Every human being wants to be free from pain and deserves to be free from pain.”