The Power of Forgiveness

On Tuesday at IU South Bend we had a speaker named Eva Kor on the topic of "The Power of Forgiveness." What made her qualified to give such a speech? Well, she was a survivor of the holocaust. Traumatic enough, certainly. But she also survived Auschwitz, the most infamous of all the Nazi death camps. But further yet, her and her twin sister were victims of Joseph Mengele's cruel experiments. Yes, if she can forgive after going through all that, I'll listen.


She was only 10 when she got off the cattle car at Auschwitz. She lost her father and brother in the crowd, never to see them again. Her mom held on tight to her and her sister. A Nazi guard went around asking who were twins. When her mom was asked if they were twins, her mom said, "Is that good?" The guard said yes, and took them away. Eva never saw her mom again.


All the twin girls, ages 2 - 16, were housed in a cramped barracks. On her first day, she went into the latrine and saw three dead children lying there. Eva said she made a vow at that moment to survive, no matter what. All that at age 10. Although she didn't go into great detail, she described one experiment she was subjected to when blood was drawn from one arm and some unknown substance injected into the other. This made her extremely sick and she vividly remembered Mengele laughing how she only had two weeks to live. But she did survive, both her and her sister. They hid in the barracks as the camp was being emptied out shortly before being liberated. Of the over 1,000 sets of twins that were at Auschwitz, only about 100 survived. Many of the other experiments were cruel beyond measure. Mengele was a true monster.

Through a long set of circumstances, Eva one day in 1993 found herself back in Germany at the home of a doctor that also was at Auschwitz and oversaw the gas chambers. He claimed that Mengele did not let anyone else know about his horrific experiments and, like many during this time, said he was only doing what he was told to do. But Eva was struck by the doctor's kindness and genuiness at what he claimed was the daily nightmare of reliving what he was made to do there (he was acquitted of war crimes at a trial in 1947). At that moment, she decided that she must forgive not only this doctor, but all those that had been a part of her cruel ordeal.

Eva is in her late 70's now, and the capacity crowd at IU was totally silent the whole time, mesmerized by her story. She has made it her mission late in life to travel around and tell her story and talk about how liberating it was to forgive those that many would say are beyond and completely undeserving of such.









During the day, they were led off to Mengele's laboratory. Many times, her arms were tied extremely tight with ropes and blood was drawn out of one arm and an unknown substance injected into the other. What that substance was, she never knew. But one day, she got extremely sick.