Forgiving Dr. Mengele
Cheri Pugh, a graduate of Northwestern University, was working as an archivist at Chicago’s WPA Film Library when she came across footage of the Auschwitz liberation, including one particularly resonant image of survivors being led from the camp by two little twins. A Web search took her to the site of the CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, and to its founder, Eva Kor, the surviving sister from the historic shot. Kor was only ten when she and her family, well-to-do Romanian Jews, were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. She and her twin, Miriam, were spotted by an officer and diverted from the gas chambers to join a special group of prisoners earmarked for the gruesome genetic experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele, the infamous “Angel of Death.” Approximately 1,500 sets of twins served as subject and control for Mengele, whose scattershot methods were more sadistic than scientific–as soon as a test subject died, the control would be murdered so that simultaneous autopsies could be performed.
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To some degree Kor makes this equation herself, and her magnanimity toward Mengele doesn’t extend to Israel’s living foes. During a conference at the Imperial War Museum in London, Kor is confronted by Dan Bar-On, a psychology professor at Ben-Gurion University, who asks her why she can forgive the Nazis but not the Palestinians. “The only way for me to deal with survival situations [is] that I fight back, or fight faster and shoot first,” Kor replies. “I do not have any difficulty reconciling with them after the guns are silent. The question is, how do we get to that point?”
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