This is a short diary with sad news from Krakow, Poland and Terre Haute, Indiana. Eva Mozes Kor passed away at 7:10 am local time on July 4 in Krakow, Poland. During the summer, she organized a pilgrimage to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Ms. Kor was born in Romania. She was born in 1934 in the village of Port in what’s now northwestern Romania. In 1944, she and her family were sent first to the local ghetto, then to Auschwitz. Girls of Eva’s age were usually sent straight to the gas chambers, but Eva had a twin: Miriam and Josef Mengele was looking for subjects to be experimented upon.
For the next 10 months, Mengele and his staff would inject one twin with either a drug or a disease while leaving the other twin alone for observation. If one twin died as a result of an experiment, the other was killed. The twins were spared having to wear the uniform and were given rations not calculated to “let them die more slowly” (as Maus puts it). Alternate days they would be poked/prodded/examined for 16 hours and injected.
The Soviets liberated the sisters on January 12, 1945. From Auschwitz, they were sent to a convent in Katowice, Poland. From there, they moved to Cluj, Romania, thence to Israel after Communism took hold in Romania. In 1960, she married Michael (Mickey) Kor, an American citizen resident in Israel and followed him back to Terre Haute, Indiana, where a soldier who met Mickey after his liberation lived and helped the Kors get their start in Indiana.
In 1984 she founded the CANDLES Institute that tracked down other victims of Mengele’s twins experiments. The CANDLES Institute also runs Indiana’s only Holocaust museum in Terre Haute. When the Oklahoma bomber sentenced to death was moved to Terre Haute for his execution, one of his fans burnt the museum down. CANDLES and the people of Terre Haute built it up bigger and better.
In the last decades of her life, she preached that by forgiving someone who abused you, you liberate yourself. She’s made a point of befriending Nazi war criminals when they were tried in Germany.
She is an honored and respected citizen in Indiana, having received Indiana’s highest honor, the Sachem, in 2017 from Gov. Eric Holcomb (R). She was named a Sagamore of the Wabash twice: once by Gov. Joe Kernan (D) in 2005 and once by Gov. Michael Pence (R) in 2013.
May her memory be a blessing.