German students meet Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor

by Brendan Dugan

Eva Kor survived the Holocaust and endured the horrifying genetic twin experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele. Despite this, she forgave the Nazis for the crimes they committed and has dedicated herself to promoting forgiveness.

Ten German students visited Eva Mozes Kor’s CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute April 4. Kor is a Auschwitz Holocaust survivor who speaks on the issues of prejudice, forgiveness, and genocide, weaving her experiences into
her presentations.

“These kind of historical events [the Holocaust] really force us to face the Kore questions of our humanity,” said Dr. Wendy Graham Westphal, Lecturer in German, who directed the trip. “We’re quite fortunate to have a survivor – it’s 2012, the war ended 1945 – who is willing to share these things with us, while many want to forget.”

“It’s amazing what horrible things this woman went through as a child, and yet how wonderful of a person she is,” said freshman Jael Sailor, a sociology major and German minor. “I think that how she talked about forgiveness was one of the most important things.”

“The eyewitnesses are getting older and passing away,” said Westphal, stressing the historic importance of meeting and listening to the generation that survived the Holocaust and WWII. Westphal intends to visit the museum
for a second time next year and, pending funding and transportation, bring more students from the German and other programs.

Indiana University Bloomington, where Westphal achieved her PhD, has the second-best German program in the United states. However,
“To my knowledge, they’ve never been to the Holocaust Museum,” said Westphal.

The Romanian-American septuagenarian founded CANDLES, the Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors, in 1984 to “shed some light” on this “dark chapter of the Holocaust,” according to the website candlesholocaustmuseum.org.

She founded the museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1995. “The interesting thing with the Nazis is that a lot of those people were ‘ordinary’ people,” said Westphal, which raises questions of human nature and morality.

Kor and her twin, Miriam Mozes, were two of many subjects of Dr. Mengele’s genetic experiments during WWII. The movement for ‘proper’ genes, or eugenics, played a significant role in Nazi fascism, but has a history that spans the US and much of Western Europe and dates from the early 1900’s.

Indiana has a unique connection to eugenics, Westphal pointed out. In 1907, Indiana became the first government to pass eugenics legislation, mandating sterilization of criminals, rapists, the poor, and mentally handicapped in state
custody. Approximately 2,500 were forcibly sterilized as a result of this and similar legislation, until they were finally excised in 1974.

More information on Eva Kor and the CANDLES Museum can be found online at candlesholocaustmuseum.org. Resources on
Indiana’s history of eugenics are compiled at iupui.edu/~eugenics/