08 Dec / Surviving the Angel of Death: The Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz by Eva Mozes Kor and Lisa Rojany Buccieri
Eva Mozes Kor survived the Holocaust because she was an identical twin. After a grueling journey from her native Romania which eventually ended at the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, Eva and her twin Miriam were immediately separated from their parents and two older sisters. The 10-year-old pair never saw their family again.
Chosen by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele – ironically called the Angel of Death – Eva and Miriam, along with countless other sets of twins, were used in medical experiments to “discover the secret of twinning” in order to produce perfect multiple births which would increase the Aryan population with that much greater alacrity. Eva, the younger but stronger of the two, had one goal in mind – to survive the horrific conditions amidst the ultimate nightmares of death and utter destruction, and lead herself and her twin sister to safety.
Liberation came with the arrival of Soviet soldiers and the twins finally left the horrors of Auschwitz behind. But life in post-war Hungary with kind family friends, then Romania with an emotionally distant aunt, proved challenging at best. Not until they emigrated to Israel did the girls finally become a “part of a new, large, welcoming family.”
The book’s epilogue contains perhaps the most remarkable part of Kor’s story when she explains how she met a former Nazi doctor from Auschwitz who agreed “to sign an affidavit about what he had said and seen and done, and to do it at the site of all those killings.” Remarkably, Kor and the former Nazi Dr. Münch traveled together to Auschwitz with their respective family members where Dr. Münch signed his affidavit and Kors signed her statement of forgiveness. “Immediately I felt that a burden of pain had been lifted from my shoulders,” writes Kor, “a pain I had lived with for fifty years: I was no longer a victim of Auschwitz, no longer a victim of my tragic past. I was free.”
By sharing her remarkable true story with younger readers, Kor reminds us all that in the most traumatic, tragic times, hope is both necessary and possible. “Anger and hate are seeds that germinate war. Forgiveness is a seed for peace.” We could all use a few more seeds for peace …
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2009