• e-mail

A Holocaust survivor who famously forgave Josefe Mengele for subjecting her and her twin sister to horrific experiments at Auschwitz has revaled how he injected her with a virus in the hope of killing her.  

Romania-born Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam arrived in Auschwitz with their family in the summer of 1944, aged 10. They were then separated from their parents and older sisters and kept with 3,000 other twins in a special barracks in the death camp. 

Eva passed away in Krakow in 2019 aged 85 during an annual education trip to Poland to visit the camp. In The Twins of Auschwitz, she shared her testimony of her experience of the camp and the experiments she was subjected to at the hands of 'The Angel of Death.'

An updated version of the book will be republished posthumously on 6th August by Octopus books.  

Dr Mengele, a fervent Nazi physician, took advantage of the death camps to run pseudo-medicinal studies on inmates. He had a particular interest in twins, as he thought they held the key to multiplying the Aryan race. 

In her book, Eva recalled how the doctor injected her with a deadly virus, expecting her to die so he could kill her twin and perform autopsies comparing unhealthy and healthy organs. 

However, years after her traumatic experience, the Holocaust survivor publicly forgave the Nazis, including Menegele, for their crimes. 

Holocaust survivor Eva Kor opened up about her harrowing experiences of Auschwitz and Dr Mengele before her death in 2019. Eva and her twin sister Miriam arrived in Auschwitz with their family in the summer of 1944. They were then unceremoniously separated from their parents and older sisters and kept with 3,000 other twins in a special barrack in the death camp (pictured in 2015 in Berlin)

Eva said that up until her death, she was not certain of which experiments were carried out on her, or which substances were injected into her blood. 

Experiments carried on her sister Miriam would affect her growth and afflict her for the rest of her life.  

'Later, I learned that Dr Mengele wanted to discover the secret of twinning. One goal of his experiments was to learn how to create blond-haired, blue-eyed babies in multiple numbers to increase the German population,' Eva wrote in The Twins of Auschwitz. 

'Hitler called Aryans, the blond and blue-eyed, white skinned Germans "The master Race" and we were his human guinea pigs.

Eva (right) and Miriam (left), pictured after the war, were the only members of their direct family to survive Auschwitz. Their parents and older sisters all died in the camp 

Dr Joseph Mengele was called 'the Angel of Death' for performing inhumane experiments on death camps inmates. By torturing countless Jews, Romani and people with disablities, he hoped to perfect the Aryan race 

'To study other natural "abnormalities" and to try to figure out how to prevent genetic mutation, the subjects of Mengele's research included dwarfs, people with disabilities, and Romani people,' she added. 

Studies carried on twins monitored how physically and psychologically similar the siblings in Auschwitz were, by carrying measurements and exercises on the pairs.

'They measured our earlobes, the bridges of our noses, the size of our lips, the width, shape and color our eyes. They compared the shade of blue of Miriam's eyes to the blue of my eyes with a chart of eye colors,' Evan recalled. 

The twins' life was schedule around their time in the Mengele labs, where they would undergo painful and bizarre procedures.  

'Three days a week we were forced to march to the labs in Auschwitz for intensive studies that left us exhausted,' Eva wrote. 

HORRIFIC EXPERIMENTS OF THE NAZI 'ANGEL OF DEATH'

Dr. Josef Mengele, an SS physician from 1943 to 1945, was known as the 'Angel of Death' for overseeing gruesome experiments at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland

Immaculately dressed, it was Josef Mengele who greeted doomed arrivals at the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, in occupied Poland.

With a flick of his gloved hands, the supreme arbiter of life and death would consign terrified prisoners either to work or to death in the gas chambers.

But many were condemned to an altogether more diabolical fate; they became guinea pigs upon his operating table as he pursued his berserk quest to clone blue-eyed Aryan supermen. Most of his victims died in terrible pain without anaesthetic.

Captivated by oddities, victims of Mengele's medical experiments were chosen based on different eye colors, growth anomalies such as a clubfoot or a hunchback, giantism or dwarfism, twins and gypsies. 

A choice 'specimen' he sent to his lab for study was the head of a 12-year-old boy he was going to dissect.

Twins held a particular fascination for him and it's estimated that he examined around 3,000 - but only 100 pairs survived. 

Mengele once impregnated one twin with the sperm from a different twin to see if she would produce twins.

When there was only one baby, one survivor claimed he tore the baby out of the mother's uterus and threw the child into an oven and walked away.

Mengele had a doctorate in medicine from Frankfurt University, but used his knowledge in a sickening manner at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he performed experiments as an SS physician from 1943 to 1945.

The so-called Angel of Death was on the Allied commanders' most-wanted list from 1944, but he escaped to South America and was never found

Although prisoners transferred to his wing to be studied escaped the gas chambers and were well fed, they often ultimately met an even more painful death.

Mengele regularly performed surgery without anaesthetic and would obtain bodies to work on simply by injecting chloroform into inmates' hearts while they slept, which would kill them in seconds.

He was most interested in heredity and once tried to change the colour of children’s eyes by injecting chemicals directly into them.

Pregnant women were also singled out. He was known to have performed vivisections on them before consigning them to the death chambers.

Prisoners suffering from schizophrenia and depression were subjected to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

The goal was to treat incapacitated prisoners so that they could return to the work force.

Most of the experiments were unsuccessful and led to the death of the prisoners.

The so-called Angel of Death was on the Allied commanders' most-wanted list from 1944, but he escaped to South America and was never found, despite the best efforts of private investigators and the Israeli secret service, Mossad.

He died in 1979 after suffering a stroke while swimming and thirteen years later, DNA tests proved his identity beyond doubt. 

Advertisement

'The other three days we were in the blood labs in Birkenau. One day melded into the next,' she added. 

In the blood lab, the twins would all be injected with different unknown substances.  

'I took those injections as the price we had to pay to survive,' Eva explained. 'We gave them our blood, our bodies, our pride, our dignity and in turn, they let us live one more day.'

'In those days we didn't know what the experiments were for or what we were injected with. Later, we found out that Dr Mengele purposely gave some twins dangerous, life-threatening diseases such as scarlet fever, then followed them with injections of something else to see if it cured the disease. 

'Some injections were attempts to change the color of eyes,' she revealed. 

'Older girls many years after we were all liberated, told us Mengele had taken them to a lab and given them a transfusion of blood from a boy and had transfused their blood into the bodies of boys.'

The Twins of Auschwitz, by Eva Mozes Kor and Lisa Rojany Buccieri is published by Octopus on August 6 

'He wanted to discover a way to change girls into boys and boys into girls. Many of these details I learned forty years later, such as the twin teenage boys who had some of their private parts cut off in Mengele's quest to see if they could turn them into girls,' Eva wrote. 

'One of those boys died in his bed right next to his twin, who said later, "I could feel my brother's body turning cold".'

Eva revealed she herself was injected with a life-threatening disease as part of Mengele's experiments, adding they did not inject her twin with the same substance. 

She was taken to the camp infirmary, a place, she said, which looked like the Valley of Death from scriptures.  

'Dr Mengele laughed and said about me with a smirk: "Too bad, She is so young and has only two weeks to live".'

'I've since learned that Mengele knew what disease they had infected me with and how it would progress. It might have been beriberi (which affects the pulmonary system and can cause heart failure) or spotted fever. In all the years since, I have never found out for sure,' Eva wrote. 

Powered only by her will to live, Eva managed to miraculously overcome her symptoms and was sent back to her barracks, where she was reunited with Miriam. 

However, she learned that her sister had suffered some consequences of her recovery.  

'When I did not die as Mengele expected, Mirian was taken to the labs and given many injections that made her sick. The shots would stunt the growth of her kidneys, keeping them the size of a ten-year-old's,' she explained in the book. 

'I did learn that Mengele had planned for me to die from the disease I had been given,' Eva revealed.  

'Mr Miklos Nyiszli, a Jewish prison and pathologist, wrote and published an eyewitness account about how Mengele routinely ordered pathologists to perform autopsies on twins who had died within hours of each other, an unique opportunity to compare the effects of disease on healthy and diseased bodies that were identical in most other ways,' she explained. 

Eva and Miriam in 1935, aged four. The twins were always dressed in pretty dresses by their mother

Top row from the left, sister Aliz, father Alexander Mozes, sister Edit and friend Luci. Bottom row from the left: Miriam, mother Jaffa, Eva and cousin Shmulik before the war

'If I had died in the infirmary, Miriam would have been rushed to the lab and killed with a shot of chloroform to her heart,' she added.  

Miriam and Eva both survived the camp and were liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. 

They returned to Portz, in central Romania, to the farm their family had owned before the war,  

However, they found that their parents and older sisters had not survived the camps, and had one aunt for only family, who managed to move them to Israel to escape the communist rule. 

Eva explained how she met her husband, Michael Kor in 1960, married him within weeks and followed him to the US where they settled in Indiana. 

The couple had two children, the eldest being a boy named Alex. In The Twins of Auschwitz, Eva revealed her children were bullied by other kids because she was not 'like other moms.' 

WHAT WAS THE AUSCHWITZ CONCENTRATION CAMP?

Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp used by the Nazis during World War Two.

The camp, which was located in Nazi-occupied Poland, was made up of three main sites. 

Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a combined concentration and extermination camp and Auschwitz III–Monowitz, a labour camp, with a further 45 satellite sites.

Auschwitz was an extermination camp used by the Nazis in Poland to murder more than 1.1 million Jews

Birkenau became a major part of the Nazis' 'Final Solution', where they sought to rid Europe of Jews.  

An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp, of whom at least 1.1 million died – around 90 percent of which were Jews. 

Since 1947, it has operated as Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by Unesco. 

Since 1947, it has operated as Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which in 1979 was named a World Heritage Site by Unesco

Advertisement

Public perception of the Kors and other American Holocaust survivors changed when a documentary about the Holocaust aired in 1978.  

In 1995, Eva opened the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana.    

Though the non-profit organisation, Eva and Miriam contacted hundreds of so-called Mengele twins who had survived the horrors of the camp and the Angel of Death's inhumane experiments. 

Eva publicly forgave numerous Nazi officers in her later years, including Dr Joseph Mengele. 

She first decided to write a letter of forgiveness to a one Dr Munch, who had agreed to speak at a lecture with her in 1993. 

Eva said she felt a weight had been lifted off her shoulders after writing the letter. 

She did not consider writing one for Mengele until a friend challenged her to do so. 

'At first I was adamant that I could never forgive Dr Mengele but then I realized I had the power now…the power to forgive. It was my right to use it. No one could take it away,' she wrote for The Forgiveness Project. 

'On 27 January 1995, at the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, I stood by the ruins of the gas chambers with my children – Dr Alex Kor and Rina Kor – and with Dr Munch and his children and grandchild,' she recalled. 

'Dr Munch signed his document about the operation of the gas chambers while I read my document of forgiveness and signed it. As I did that, I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me. I was no longer in the grip of hate; I was finally free,' she went on. 

'The day I forgave the Nazis, privately I forgave my parents whom I hated all my life for not having saved me from Auschwitz.' 

'Children expect their parents to protect them; mine couldn’t. And then I forgave myself for hating my parents.'