In 1944, Eva Kor and her family were forced out of their home and onto a train heading toward Auschwitz, a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. Kor traveled from a ghetto in Simleu Silvaniei, Romania, for 70 hours without food or water. As soon as they stepped off the train, she and her twin Miriam were separated from their parents and two older sisters.
The 10-year-old twins never saw their family again.
During their year in Auschwitz, the two were subjects in Dr. Josef Mengele’s now infamous genetic experimentations on twins. Mengele’s experiments varied from harmful to agonizing and lethal during his time at Auschwitz.
“There was a time when I was very close to dying in camp, but I knew that I had to take care of Miriam, so I fought and survived,” Kor said. “Ever since then, I’ve been a survivor, and I want people to fight in their own lives.”
She has been giving lectures about her time in Auschwitz and her time after the liberation for 36 years. Today, she will speak at 4 p.m. in John R. Emens Auditorium.
It was her story and her message of survival and forgiveness that sparked the interest in bringing Kor to Ball State, said Steve Robert, chairman of the Committee for a Positive Influence.
“There will be a time very soon that there won’t be a surviving Holocaust survivor alive,” Robert said. “She’s a part of history, and no matter how sad that part is, it’s still important to hear these stories so we won’t forget the effects they had on people.”
The Jewish Studies Program brings Holocaust survivors to campus annually to speak to a body of about 400 students, but with the help of the Committee for a Positive Influence on board this year, Kor will be able to speak to more than 3,500 people.
In addition to Kor’s story, the event will include a 40-minute documentary at 3 p.m. and an address from Muncie Mayor Dennis Tyler. The audience also will have an opportunity to ask Kor questions.
“The most powerful part of the presentation will be hearing her story of forgiveness,” Robert said. “She can teach us a lot of about the power of it and how it can affect us.”
At an early age, Kor started taking care of herself. In the years that followed the separation from her family, she witnessed how cruel people can be, experiencing a life wrought with fear. After the fear subsided, she picked up ways to move on with her life.
But it took nearly 60 years for Kor to learn how to forgive.
Now, when she gives presentations to high schools, college campuses, medical professionals and even visitors of Auschwitz, her main message is the power of forgiveness. That wasn’t always the message she offered audiences, though.
Kor spoke publicly about her experiences for the first time in 1978. After seeing the NBC miniseries “The Holocaust,” she contacted the station and asked if they had any footage from the camps so she could see if she recognized anyone. Unfortunately, the network didn’t.
But after finding out that she was a survivor, the station asked her to speak on camera and would air the interview after the final segment of the show. After the airing, she started telling her stories to anyone willing to listen.
“I was extremely nervous during my first lectures,” Kor said. “I would let my brain wander and my mouth would follow, spewing out anything. But people continued to be interested, and it was a great feeling knowing that people in the 1940s rejected me for who I was and now, in a totally different society, people were accepting me.”
During the early years, she would end her lecture with the same statement. Each time, she felt like she was telling the story of a different little girl, not herself. In 1985, she was giving her presentation at Indiana State University when she broke down.
As she told the students the story about the separation from her mom, she began sobbing. Embarrassed and confused, she couldn’t figure out why she was getting hit with those emotions at that time.
“I realize now that me and that little girl were becoming one, and it no longer felt like I was telling someone else’s story,” Kor said.
It was 10 years later that she started to forgive. She had been lecturing about the power of forgiveness, but she never felt like she forgave the men who destroyed her family.
At her own initiative, Kor arranged a meeting with Dr. Hans Münch, a Nazi who performed experiments at Auschwitz alongside Mengele. She hoped to find out more about the tests they ran on her and her twin.
Kor was nervous that Münch would not treat her like a human being, but like the test subject she was treated as in Auschwitz. She was surprised when he treated her with kindness and respect, but couldn’t offer her any information about the experiments performed on her.
She decided to write him a thank you note.
“How do you write a thank you note to a Nazi?” Kor asked. “I just took a piece of paper and pen and started writing, and soon, I realized that I had forgiven him and all the others for their actions so long ago.”
Ball State English professor Frank Felsenstein, who teaches a class on remembering the Holocaust, said this kind of mentality is not rare.
In his class each semester, Felsenstein asks his students if they would be willing to forgive Nazis if they were survivors. In the past, the students were divided down the middle. This semester, he said almost no one said they would be able to forgive the Nazis.
This will be Felsenstein’s first time seeing Kor, and he looks forward to the Q&A after Kor’s presentation.
“It’s going to be exciting to see how people react to her and what questions they will be asking,” Felsenstein said. “With the mixture of students and residents of Muncie, it’s going to be really eye opening for a lot of people.”
Kor said she will quit lecturing at schools across the nation when either her brain or her mouth stops working.
“When people talk about the Holocaust, they speak about what these ‘miserable monsters did to all these dead people,’” she said. “You can’t learn anything from dead people unless you are [an] anthropologist. Those that survived came out of Auschwitz with a message of hope, and that’s what I want to share.”
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