Eva Mozes Kor

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Eva Mozes Kor (2016)

Eva Mozes Kor (born Eva Mozes ; born January 31, 1934 in Portz , today: Porț , Marca parish, Sălaj district , Romania ; † July 4, 2019 in Krakow ) was a survivor of the Holocaust and became von Josef with her twin sister Miriam Mengele abused for human experiments.

It triggered critical reactions from other Holocaust survivors on several occasions, including when, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, she personally forgave all National Socialists for their deeds.

Life

Eva Mozes Kor was the daughter of the farmer Alexander Mozes and his wife Jaffa, who lived in Transylvania with their older daughters Edit and Aliz and their twin sisters Eva and Miriam . In their home village of Portz with around 100 families, the devout Mozes were the only Jews. Around 1935, Alexander Mozes and his brother Aaron were arbitrarily arrested by the Iron Guard . After their release, both went to Palestine for a few months. They made the plan to emigrate there with their families. For the Mozes family, the plans failed because their mother refused to emigrate with four small children and leave their own parents behind. Ultimately, the family did not consider the threat posed by National Socialist Germany and the increasing anti-Semitism in their own country to be particularly great.

In March 1944 the Mozes family was deported to Șimleu Silvaniei , which at that time belonged to Hungary. There they were housed with 7,000 other Jews in a collection camp without permanent buildings. Two months later, took place at the Hungarian campaign , the deportation to the concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau . Immediately after arriving at the concentration camp, Eva and Miriam were identified as twins as part of the selection at the “ramp”. While the parents and the two older sisters were probably murdered in the gas chambers immediately upon arrival , the twins were brought to Josef Mengele , who carried out medical experiments on them. In July 1944, Eva was given a syringe containing an unknown substance that caused serious illness. Eva spent three weeks in the infirmary, but recovered. During this time her sister was also subjected to experiments and became seriously ill, so that Eva had to steal potatoes for her at great risk.

Miriam (far right) and Eva Mozes (next to her, partially covered) during the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945

Like many children and other inmates unable to march , Eva and Miriam Mozes were not taken on the death marches by the retreating SS in January 1945 , but left behind in the concentration camp. After the liberation by the Red Army on January 27, 1945, the sisters initially stayed in the camp and after a few weeks were taken to a Catholic orphanage in Katowice , Poland . From there they made contact with a surviving prison functionary in a refugee camp in the city, whose twin daughters were also abused by Mengele for experiments and who took in Eva and Miriam. In May they were all taken by train to a refugee camp in Slutsk (now Minskaya Woblasz , Belarus ). In October 1945 the refugees from this camp were sent back to their home countries. Eva and Miriam found their parents' house looted and neglected and moved to an aunt in Cluj , where they lived until 1950.

The following years were marked by the anti-Semitism of the Romanian population and by the harassment of the authorities against landowners and Jews. In 1950 the sisters were able to emigrate to Israel after giving up all of their property. They were met by their uncle Aaron in Haifa and lived for two years in a youth village run by the Children and Youth Alijah . In 1952 both were drafted into the Israel Defense Forces . Miriam trained as a nurse there, Eva was trained as a technical draftsman and left the army in 1960 as a staff sergeant . In April 1960 she met Michael Kor, a Holocaust survivor who had come to Israel as a tourist from Terre Haute , Indiana to visit his brother. They married, Eva moved to her husband in Terre Haute, had two children and worked as a real estate agent. Her sister Miriam had three children and developed a serious kidney disease during her pregnancy, probably a late consequence of Josef Mengele's attempts. Eva donated one of her kidneys to her in 1987. Miriam Mozes Ziegler died on June 6, 1993 of kidney cancer . Eva Mozes Kor died on July 4, 2019 in Krakow during her annual CANDLES trip to Poland.

Organization CANDLES

Eva Mozes Kor during a study trip by CANDLES to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (2013, English)

Eva Mozes Kor and her family were also exposed to anti-Semitic persecution in the United States, with insults against their children and swastika graffiti on their home. The situation improved significantly with the broadcast of the television series Holocaust - The History of the Weiss Family in 1978. In the same year, Eva Mozes Kor began giving lectures in which she reported on her fate and that of her family as a contemporary witness. She could not answer many of the questions from her audience and felt it was a shortcoming that there were hardly any books with information about Auschwitz and Mengele's experiments.

Together with her sister Miriam, Kor founded the self-help organization Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors ( CANDLES , German: Children of Auschwitz, survivors of fatal Nazi laboratory experiments ). They succeeded in locating 122 survivors of the twin experiments in ten countries on four continents and helping many with specific problems. They fought largely in vain to clarify the background to the experiments and their medical consequences in order to improve the treatment of the victims.

After her sister's death, Kor founded the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute in 1995 . The museum was completely destroyed by an arson attack in 2003. After the reconstruction, the reopening took place in 2005. Eva Mozes Kor gave lectures until the end of her life, especially in front of school classes, and carried out study trips to Auschwitz every year. The filmmakers Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh accompanied Kor with the camera for years, from which the film Forgiving Dr. Mengele came into being.

Attitude towards Nazi perpetrators and descendants

In later years, Eva Kor took a position open to reconciliation (“forgiveness”) with the Nazi perpetrators, which triggered controversial reactions and was criticized and rejected as inappropriate by many Holocaust survivors. For example, Eva Kor showed her willingness to meet the then last surviving SS camp doctor from Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hans Münch , and to “forgive” him publicly on the occasion of a joint visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in 1995; this after Münch, for his part, had admitted in a handwritten and certified statement the existence of the gas chambers and the mass murder of the Jews in Auschwitz, of which he had been a “witness”.

Furthermore, Eva Mozes Kor was ready to meet for the first time in 2009 with Rainer Höß, the grandson of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß , whom she subsequently referred to as her friend and "symbolically" "adopted" as "grandson" in 2015 . For this she was strongly criticized by other Jews, because in 2009 Rainer Höß tried to make a profit from his grandfather's legacies by offering them to Yad Vashem for sale instead of making them available free of charge. In 2014 she appeared with Rainer Höß at several events against right-wing extremism.

In 2015, Kor attended the Auschwitz trial against Oskar Gröning as a joint plaintiff . Unlike most of the accused in Nazi trials, Gröning admitted moral complicity on the first day of the trial, showed remorse and asked for forgiveness. Eva Kor later held out her hand to the defendant as a gesture of reconciliation. She thanked him expressly because he did not refuse to testify and did not deny the Holocaust, but described it. As a co-plaintiff, she did not consider imprisonment for the 93-year-old to be desirable; she was more concerned with clarifying the acts in extermination camps and with combating right-wing extremism. The judge should condemn him to testify to organized mass murder in front of young Germans.

In a statement she was criticized by 49 joint plaintiffs: she used the broad public - which she received as a joint plaintiff with regard to 300,000 murdered Hungarian Jews - for a personal gesture of forgiveness that completely contradicts her role as a joint plaintiff.

Kor replied that it was an unplanned gesture. Their behavior does not absolve the perpetrator from taking responsibility for his actions. She explained to the press her conciliatory behavior towards Nazi perpetrators with self-interest, saying that she had forgiven the perpetrators "not because they deserve it, but because I deserve it". A victim has the right to be free at some point and you cannot be free from what has been done to you if you do not shake off this "daily burden of pain and anger". Éva Fahidi declared in a similar way: She could not forgive on behalf of all those murdered, including 49 of her family members, but she did not want to continue to hate.

Stumbling blocks

Stumbling block for Eva Mozes Kor in Porţ
Stumbling blocks for the Mozes family in Porţ.

On July 7, 2014, as part of the memorial art concept, Stolpersteine by Gunter Demnig, six Stolpersteine ​​were laid on the former home of the Mozes family in Porţ: for Eva Mozes Kor, her parents, Zseni-Jaffa and Alexander Mozes, and her three sisters Aliz, Edit and Miriam Mozes. The memorial stone for Eva Kor Mozes bears the Romanian inscription: “Aici Locuia / Eva Kor Mozes / Născută 1934 / Arestata Martie 1944 / Deportata 1944 / Auschwitz-Birkenau / Eliberată Supraviețuit”. In German translation: "Here lived / Eva Kor Mozes / Born 1934 / Arrested March 1944 / Deported 1944 / Auschwitz-Birkenau / Liberated, survived".

Trivia

In 2015, the band Saltatio Mortis released the song Angel of Death about their history in the concentration camp on the album Zirkus Zeitgeist . Eva Mozes Kor met with a band member and talked about the song.

Publications

literature

  • Verena Mayer: The power of the victim. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3./4. December 2016, p. 51.

Web links

Commons : Eva Mozes Kor  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri: I survived the angel of death. Pp. 8-26.
  2. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri: I survived the angel of death. Pp. 26-36.
  3. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri: I survived the angel of death. Pp. 56-69.
  4. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri: I survived the angel of death. Pp. 80-109.
  5. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri: I survived the angel of death. Pp. 102-120.
  6. ^ Sue Loughlin: Holocaust survivor, forgiveness activist Eva Kor dies at 85. In: tribstar.com . July 4, 2019, archived from the original on July 4, 2019 ; accessed on July 4, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri: I survived the angel of death. Pp. 114-115.
  8. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri: I survived the angel of death. Pp. 115-116.
  9. ↑ Our Story , website of the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, accessed July 5, 2019.
  10. ↑ Cf. Roman Heflik: Forgiveness for a Devil , in: Der Spiegel, December 8, 2005.
  11. ↑ Kors “Declaration of Amnesty” (1995) is documented on the website of the Candles Holocaust Museum , accessed on July 5, 2019.
  12. ↑ See Candles Holocaust Museum , accessed on July 6, 2019.
  13. ↑ See Malte Lehming: Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor with Günther Jauch. Nobody has to justify their forgiveness , in: Der Tagesspiegel, April 27, 2015.
  14. ^ Alan Posener: Nazis always go - The business of Rainer Höß. In: Welt Online . May 5, 2012, accessed July 4, 2019 .
  15. ↑ The negotiation observer Beate Klarsfeld described his request for forgiveness as extraordinary for a Nazi trial: Sabine Tenta: Beate Klarsfeld on Gröning's confession: “If it's honest, it's wonderful”. In: wdr.de . April 22, 2015, accessed July 4, 2019 .
  16. ↑ Verena Mayer: Why an Auschwitz survivor forgives the perpetrators of yore. In: sueddeutsche.de . December 3, 2016, accessed July 4, 2019 .
  17. ↑ Jochen Buchsteiner: Holocaust survivor Eva Kor: "A victim has the right to be free". In: FAZ.net . April 24, 2015, accessed July 4, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Auschwitz trial against Gröning: Eva Pusztai-Fahidi: "If you continue to hate, then you remain a victim". In: Focus Online . April 27, 2015, accessed July 4, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Eva Mozes Kor - our inspiration for the song “Angel of Death” #weremember. Retrieved July 5, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Mozes Kor, Eva
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mozes, Eva (maiden name); Kor, Eva Mozes
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH January 31, 1934
PLACE OF BIRTH Portz , Romania
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 2019
Place of death Krakow