The character arc of Eva Mozes Kor

Who was Eva Mozes Kor?

He said two weeks. She had seventy five years.

Her parents were farmers in Portz and the only Jewish residents in the area. There were four girls: Edit, Aliz, and the twins Eva and Miriam. In 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary, the family was moved to a regional ghetto where they had no housing and made tents out of sheets. Weeks later they were put in cattle cars for four days.

At the selection on arrival at Birkenau, a guard tricked her mother into saying that Eva and Miriam were twins. The twins were taken away at once, over her protests. Eva said that was the last time she saw her mother, her arms stretched out as she was pulled away, and that she never got to say goodbye and did not really understand it would be the last time. Her mother, her father and both older sisters were murdered.

The twins spent the next nine months as subjects of the experiments run by Josef Mengele. After one set of injections she became very ill, and Mengele, checking her fever, said she would be dead within two weeks. She has said she was determined not to fulfil their verdict. Her one clear memory of the two weeks that followed is crawling across the floor of the hospital barracks towards a tap, because she could no longer walk, telling herself she must survive. The fever broke. Three weeks later she was back with Miriam.

The Red Army reached Auschwitz on 27 January 1945. She and Miriam were among about a hundred and eighty surviving children, most of them twins. A friend of their mother, found by searching a displaced persons camp, took responsibility for them and got them home. They lived with an aunt in Cluj, went to Israel at sixteen in 1950, and both served in its army; Eva served eight years and reached sergeant major in the engineering corps. In 1960 she married Michael Kor and moved to Indiana, and they raised two children in Terre Haute. When Miriam needed a kidney, Eva gave her one, saying she had one sister and two kidneys, so it was an easy choice. Miriam died in 1993.

The public work started in 1978. She and Miriam began looking for other survivors of the experiments, and in 1984 she founded CANDLES, which eventually found a hundred and twenty two of them. She went back to Auschwitz that year and promised to tell her family story, and then went back every summer for the rest of her life, often guiding others round it. She sued a pharmaceutical company in 1999 over its part in the experiments, and the settlement created a five billion dollar remembrance fund. She kept a small museum in Terre Haute; somebody firebombed it in 2003 and she rebuilt it. In 2007 she got a Holocaust education law through the Indiana legislature. In the 1990s she publicly forgave all of the Nazis, including Mengele, which made her internationally known and which many people objected to; she said she was speaking only for herself, that she had spent months writing letters to the people involved, and that it was what allowed her to recover. In 2015 she testified at a trial in Germany and embraced the defendant, a ninety three year old who had agreed to say what he had seen.

The moments

Eva Mozes Kor's timeline.

Eva Mozes Kor: frequently asked questions

What people ask about her line.

Sources

• Eva Mozes Kor, English Wikipedia biography.
• Forgiving Dr Mengele, the 2006 documentary.
• Eva: A-7063, the 2018 documentary, broadcast on PBS.
• Her six authored and co-authored books, and the CANDLES museum in Terre Haute.