WATCH: Holocaust Survivor Explains Why She Forgave Dr. Mengele
Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor forgave the Nazis, including Dr. Josef Mengele, who experimented on her. Image by facebook
By Aiden Pink September 27, 2017
A Holocaust survivor explained in a video for BuzzFeed that has been watched more than 40 million times why she forgave the Nazi doctor who experimented on her and her twin sister.
Eva Mozes Kor and her family were deported from Romania to Auschwitz in May 1944. She and her twin sister Miriam were saved from death and sent to be experimented upon by Dr. Josef Mengele and his team, who sought to study twins.
She explained how, 50 years later, she met with Dr. Hans Munch, one of the doctors there, who was convinced to sign a document attesting to the veracity of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Mozes Kor also signed a document there forgiving him and all Nazis, and later explained that she had specifically forgiven Mengele.
“I felt free, free from Auschwitz, free from Mengele,” she explained in the video. While she said that most Holocaust survivors had denounced her, Mozes Kor called it “an act of self-healing, self-liberation, self-empowerment….We cannot change what happened. That is the tragic part. But we can change how we relate to it.”
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism so that we can be prepared for whatever news 2025 brings.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
