opinion

Swarens: 'I refuse to be a victim' — an Auschwitz survivor's journey to forgiveness

Before the horror. Before the persecution, the murders, the torture. Before the 70-year journey to healing and forgiveness, she was Eva, a spirited Romanian farm girl who adored her mother and feared her father.

She still remembers her mother Jaffa's joy for living and a favorite song, about lilacs. She remembers her sisters Edit and Aliz's well-kept dresses, and the pride they took in their appearance. She remembers her father Alexander's harsh discipline, and the lessons of bending, not breaking, under authority.

And she remembers the fear that descended as dark clouds grew in Germany and spread across Europe. Spread as the Nazis occupied Romania. Spread as the only Jewish family in the village of Portz was forced to abandon their farm for life in a ghetto in 1944.

Spread as the family huddled for days in a cattle car, without food or water, bound for a destination they prayed not to reach. Spread as they stepped, amid screams and threats, onto a concrete slab — the selection platform, where life and death were meted out within minutes.

Spread finally as her father and older sisters, and then her mother, were ripped away from Eva, and lost forever to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Only Miriam, her 10-year-old twin sister, remained.

Then, for eight horrific months, she was no longer Eva.

She had become A 7063. A child of the Angel of Death. In the most hellish place on earth.

"I spoiled the experiment. I survived."

On a Monday morning seven decades later, I am staring at the partial record of an experiment, one that documents a test conducted on the child known as A 7063, when I hear Eva Kor's voice calling for me.

She is moving quickly, as quickly as an 80-year-old with two replacement hips should move, across an exhibit room in the small Holocaust museum that she founded two decades ago in Terre Haute.

It's a hectic morning for Eva as she rushes to complete last minute tasks before a departure the next day for Germany. Her conversation with Wolf Blitzer from CNN has been done for some time (it will air as part of the "Voices of Auschwitz" documentary at 9 p.m. Tuesday). But interviews with German media, the BBC and other news outlets are still to come.

Then there's the trek to Poland to connect with her group — 80 people from four countries — that Eva will lead to Auschwitz on Tuesday to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' most infamous death camp. An estimated 1.1 million people were murdered on those killing grounds.

Eva notices that I've been studying that record of a test inflicted on her 70 years earlier, and she wants me to understand something: The experiments on twins, led by Dr. Josef Mengele, were horribly inhumane, but they were not the random acts of madmen. They were carefully planned, documented and controlled.

Mengele and other doctors at Auschwitz worked on behalf of one of Germany's leading research institutes, with the goal of furthering the study of eugenics. Twins were selected as involuntary test subjects because their genetic similarities meant one could be used as a control subject. If one child died as the result of an experiment, the other twin was murdered, and autopsies were conducted on both.

As Eva notes, the eugenics movement was not limited to Nazi Germany. Long before the rise of Adolf Hitler, the idea that a better race of humans could be developed through selective breeding had gained sway in the United States. Indiana, in fact, passed what is considered to be the world's first eugenics law in 1907. It called for the involuntary sterilization of "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists." The law was revised in 1927 and finally repealed in 1974. But not before more than 2,300 people — fellow Americans, fellow Hoosiers — were forcibly sterilized.

On her first night in Auschwitz, Eva stumbled across children's bodies on a latrine floor. She vowed that she and Miriam would not meet that fate.

"I became more of Miriam's mother than her sister," Eva said. "I felt responsible for her life."

But, of course, Eva's own life hung above a deep pit, and one experiment nearly pushed her into the darkness.

Under Mengele's orders, Eva was given a set of injections that triggered a high fever. Her arms and legs swelled, and her body shook. Eva remembers that Mengele told the other doctors that she had only a couple of weeks to live.

But two weeks turned into three. Then four. And five.

The farm girl from Portz, often disciplined early in life for breaking her father's rules, had defied the doctors of Auschwitz.

She lived.

"A woman ran into the barracks, yelling at the top of her voice, 'We are free! We are free! We are free!'"

As we look at a large photo of women and children, with Eva and Miriam at the head of the line, marching between two barbed wire fences, I ask what she remembers about the liberation.

"There had been fierce fighting in the area starting in November of '44, and we knew the end was near," Eva said. "Then one day we opened the barracks door and the guard towers were empty. The Nazis were gone."

Some prisoners saw an opportunity to escape and slipped through the fence. Others, including about 200 children, remained in the camp, surviving on provisions the Germans had left behind. Eva was given the job of organizing bread ("organizing was camp language for stealing from the Nazis"). The worst appeared to be over.

But the Nazis had planned a final act of cruelty.

One day in the middle of January, SS troops drove up to the barracks as Eva and others stood outside. They had returned to destroy the evidence — the death chambers, the ovens, the prisoners.

"The last thing I remembered was the barrel of a gun about 3 feet from me," Eva said. "When I woke up, piles of bodies were all around me. I had fainted before the bullets killed me."

A few days later, a new set of soldiers entered the camp. The Soviet Army had arrived, and the horrors of Auschwitz had finally ended.

"They gave us chocolate, cookies and hugs," Eva said. "The most important part for me was that they didn't look like Nazis."

"I refuse to be a victim."

Seventy years later, people flock to Eva. She speaks regularly to students in classrooms and at the museum. She's featured at conferences and seminars in the U.S. and Europe. And she's led hundreds of people on tours of Auschwitz.

The interest is driven in part by the opportunity to learn firsthand from a survivor of one of humanity's darkest times. But there's also Eva's powerful message: Forgiveness frees victims from their past, no matter how terrible the experience.

"I have the power to forgive," she said. "Forgiveness and healing free us from despair, but if we don't forgive, in my opinion, we continue to give the perpetrators power over us."

For decades, Mengele and the other monsters of Auschwitz continued to hold power over Eva — as she emigrated to Israel with Miriam; as she met and married another Holocaust survivor, Mickey Kor; as they built a life together and raised a family in Terre Haute.

The pain and the grief were strong. The torment went on year after year.

Then, in 1993, an invitation to speak to a group of doctors in Boston came with an unusual request — could she help locate a former Nazi doctor who would talk about his experiences?

"I said where am I going to find a Nazi doctor?" Eva told me. "The last I checked they weren't advertising in the Yellow Pages."

But through connections in Germany, she was able to track down Dr. Hans Munch, who had witnessed executions and signed death certificates at Auschwitz. He agreed to record a video about what he had seen.

Two years later, at the 50th anniversary of the liberation, Eva, with her children, and Munch, with his children, met at Auschwitz. The former Nazi doctor read and signed a statement about his role at the death camp.

Eva read a statement of forgiveness.

"As I did that I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me. I was no longer in the grip of pain and hate," Eva would say later. "I was finally free."

She returns to Auschwitz often these days; two trips are scheduled for this year. Sometimes she visits with fellow survivors. Sometimes with the children and grandchildren of former Nazis.

She has even danced on the spot of the selection platform, where her family was lost.

"In that place, they took away the joy of my life," Eva said. "By dancing, I am saying I have reclaimed joy. I reject living in despair."

Email Swarens at tim.swarens@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @tswarens.