Monday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day; so designated because January 27, 1945 was the day that the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was liberated by Soviet troops. We’ll mark the occasion on Thursday by revisiting a conversation with Eva Kor, a Holocaust survivor and victim of Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Mengele was given the name “Angel of Death,” because of his position as a SS physician in charge of selecting which new prisoners of the camp would be killed or selected for forced labor. Kor and her sister launched a search for other twins who survived Mengele’s experiments and located 122 individual survivors.
She founded C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust museum in Indiana. In 1995, she made headlines for issuing a personal “Declaration of Amnesty” to those individuals responsible for the Holocaust. Her act of forgiveness inspired some and angered others. Eva Kor gave a talk on forgiveness titled “Encountering Dr. Mengele” in April 2013 at Utah State University as a part of a symposium series on the Holocaust presented by the USU Religious Studies Program.
