Forgiveness: The Key to Self-Healing— An Interview with Eva Mozes-Kor

Abstract

Eva Mozes-Kor was ten years old when she and her family were deported from their home in Transylvania to Auschwitz. There, Dr. Josef Mengele was doing medical experiments on twins. Eva’s mother, father, and two older sisters were put to death in the gas chambers, but Eva and her twin sister Miriam were preserved to be subjected to experiments. Eva was given an injection that nearly killed her at the time, and Miriam died of the aftereffects of the experiments many years later. As an adult, having married and moved to America, Eva watched her sister struggle with lingering medical issues. She donated a kidney to Miriam and tried to gather information about what had been done to her sister at Auschwitz, but Mengele’s files have never been recovered. Eva’s search to find more information, or even Mengele himself, was unsuccessful; but in the course of her quest, Eva discovered the powerful healing effects of forgiveness. On May 20, 2010, she met with our editor, Joanie Eppinga, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana that she started fifteen years ago, and gave the following interview.

Keywords

• interview
• holocaust
• forgiveness
• mengele