Why would an Auschwitz survivor subjected to Josef Mengele’s cruel experiments, along with her 10-year-old twin sister, publicly offer forgiveness to Nazi war criminals? What’s in it for Eva Mozes Kor, subject of the documentary “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”?
In one word, freedom, the Terre Haute, Ind., realtor said in a panel discussion Sunday afternoon at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in Mountain View.
“In spite of everything, Josef Mengele no longer has power over my life and I am free,” Kor said, addressing some 200 people who stayed for the post-film discussion at the Century Cinema 16. Forgiveness, Kor said in the film, “means whatever was done to me is no longer causing me pain … The word is healing, rather than just forgiveness. Getting even has never healed a single person.”
Participants in the panel, moderated by Leslie Kane, executive director of the Holocaust Center of Northern California, offered other perspectives.
Forgiveness requires genuine repentance and contrition on the part of the wrongdoer, said John Roth, philosophy professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.
“Eva says forgiveness doesn’t have to have conditions. But in the fullest sense, it is a two-way street between two living people, a reciprocal two-way relationship, and certainly no one alive can speak for everyone else and least of all for the dead,” Roth said, adding that “there are many deeds and events, including the Holocaust, that are unforgivable.”
Kor, who founded a Holocaust museum in Terre Haute, which was burned by arson in 2003 and rebuilt, emphasized that she is speaking only for herself, not for other survivors. “With every fiber of my being, I object to the view that certain deeds cannot be forgiven, that other people should decide that I should have to live with that pain,” she said.
While “the perpetrator has to take responsibility for what he’s done,” she added, the victim can make the choice to heal.
Kor said that forgiveness does not mean forgetting or excusing. If Mengele (who hid under aliases in South America for several decades) had been put on trial, she added, “I would be the first person to ask the judge to give him life in prison,” rather than death. “I would have preferred to have a live Mengele and find out what he injected my sister with.”
In 1944, Kor, along with twin Miriam and their family, were deported from Romania to Auschwitz. Because they were twins, Kor and Miriam became the subject of Mengele’s “controlled” genetic experiments, while the rest of the family was exterminated. Miriam, who had been injected with an unknown poison, suffered lifelong health problems. Kor donated a kidney to her sister, who nonetheless died in Israel in 1993.
Together with her sister, Kor began a journey to connect with other survivors of Mengele’s experiments, founding CANDLES, an acronym for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. Determined to find Mengele’s files and learn what poisons he had used, Kor met with the late Hans Münch, an SS physician at Auschwitz.
Kor never found Mengele’s files, but she achieved a different closure. At the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1995, Kor, accompanied by Münch, issued a “declaration of amnesty” to Nazis who participated, “directly or indirectly in the murder of [her] family and millions of others,” while Münch signed a statement attesting to the crimes committed at the camp.
That meeting, and Kor’s often-heated debates with survivors and family members who have not been able to let go of their pain, have provoked widespread criticism. In “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” directors Cheri Pugh, who attended the film festival showing, and Bob Hercules, turn the camera on “Mengele twins” who express anger toward Kor.
Said Kor: “I as a victim, by forgiving, have not broken any legal, any moral law, so who on earth can tell me I shouldn’t?”
Moderator Kane interjected, “Is it perhaps a matter of semantics that you use the word ‘forgiveness’ as a synonym for ‘coming to terms’?”
Kor responded: “There might be a more appropriate word, but in 11 years I haven’t found it.”
Turning to the educational value of such films as “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” panelist Jack Weinstein, regional director of the “Facing History and Ourselves” genocide education project, said that students first have to have a solid understanding of the historical background. “The study of this kind of history demands time … First the facts, then we can think about how we feel about them.”
In an interview after the panel, Weinstein said there is no one correct way to cope with the aftermath of tragedy. “I think Eva has an amazing soul. I think Eva has found a way to come to peace with herself and her memories. For her, her work is about repair and reconciliation for herself. For me, I have not experienced what she’s experienced. I wear a different hat.”