It was Halloween, 1967. Eva Mozes Kor was safe in her home in Terre Haute, Ind. Safe with her husband and two small children. But that evening something happened that took her back, emotionally, to a time, 22 years earlier, when she was anything but safe.
As part of a Halloween prank, some children threw handfuls of dried corn at the windows of the Kor home.
The sound of the corn hitting the glass and the other noises and activities of the costumed neighborhood children terrified Kor and turned her life around.
Having lived in the U.S. only a short time, Kor was not familiar with Halloween traditions. She thought she was back in Auschwitz, once again at the mercy of Dr. Josef Mengele, whose face she could still envision clearly as she was injected with some unknown substance.
The incident brought back all of Kor’s memories of her eight-month imprisonment in Auschwitz, where she and her twin sister, Miriam, at the age of 9, served as two of Mengele’s human guinea pigs in his genetic experiments on twins.
When it became known that Kor could not cope with the Halloween tricks of the youngsters, she became the center of the town’s children’s activities for 10 years, not only on the holiday but also at other times as well.
“It got very bad,” she says. “Halloween started for them a month early. On the 4th of July they blew off firecrackers on our front porch. When the snow fell, the snowballs were flying at my head the minute I left my house.
“It was all because of the way I reacted. I tried to explain to the parents how this affected me, but at that time nobody there had heard many details about the concentration camps. I was an embarrassment to my children.
“I only wanted to tell my story, but how to tell my story I had no idea. My own son would ask me why I couldn’t just ignore it. But emotionally I could not deal with it.”
It was not until in 1977, when NBC aired the Holocaust mini-series, that Kor found a way to get her story told. She contacted her local television station, and they interviewed her after the program. Teachers and students called her as a result of the interview, and she began lecturing.
“They kept asking for more information. I would tell them whatever I remembered, in a somewhat disorganized fashion — like pieces of a puzzle — and then they would ask for more and more. So I went to the library, but I could find nothing that would help me verify my memories and pull together the picture.”
Hers was a story many in Terre Haute could not comprehend.
“I was born in a very small village,” Kor explains, “of about 100 families, called Portz, in Transylvania. My first memories go back to persecution and fear of what would happen to the family. Never, as a child, until I arrived in Israel at age 16, did I know what it meant to live without any fear of persecution.”
Kor, 60, was born into the family of a wealthy landowner. Besides the twins, the family also had two older daughters.
“We had servants who lived in the house and helped my mother,” she says, “and three servant families who lived on the land and helped my father work the land. But then the law came out that Jews couldn’t employ anybody who wasn’t Jewish, and since we were the only Jews in the village, my father had to let them go.
“My father tried to work the land to the best of his ability, and we, the children, pitched in, so we had to grow up pretty fast.”
Kor says one of her earliest memories is of an incident that occurred in 1st grade.
“The books we read were filled with hatred,” she says, “and people have difficulty understanding that it was that imbedded in the culture. It was the law of the land to persecute Jews. The problems in our book had such questions as, `If you kill five Jews, how many Jews are left?’ Most people cannot possibly understand that the math books in our school had questions like that.
“There was no place for us to go for help. If somebody did kill a Jew, the law supported them. All Jews could do was not rock the boat, stay out of the way of the people who were in power to harass us.”
As a child, Kor says, she could not understand why she had to take that kind of treatment.
“I think children have a very strong sense of fairness,” she says.
She has written a children’s book (“Little Eva and Miriam in First Grade,” C.A.N.D.L.E.S., $10) about the incident that happened in her 1st grade classroom that she remembers so vividly.
“Some of the children put three or four eggs on the teacher’s chair, and when she sat down she splattered her new dress. Everyone said it was the two `dirty Jews’ who did it, and she believed this without letting us even speak. We were put in the corner and made to kneel on corn kernels for an hour.
“I have never seen such a united group filled with hatred. We were automatically blamed and punished. When I went home and told my mother, I expected her to go to school and straighten it out. But my poor mother said, `There’s nothing I can do about it. Children, I’m very sorry. You have to learn that we are Jews, that we have no rights. You have to learn to take it.’ “
This, says Kor, she could not do. She says she was a very angry child and that some of that anger is undoubtedly responsible for her survival. In spring of 1944, when Kor and her sister were 9 years old, the entire family was deported to Auschwitz.
“Who was going to protect us?” she says. “All our neighbors — none of them dared stand up.”
The first time Kor went to the bathroom in the camp, she found the corpses of three dead children on the floor.
“They were naked,” she says. “Their bodies were shriveled and their eyes were wide open. Suddenly I knew that we could end up in their place, and I made a solemn pledge that I would do anything in my power to make sure that Miriam and I would not end up like those children on that floor.
“I am convinced that if I had not entered that latrine that night I would not have survived. From that time on I concentrated all my energy on survival. We had turned down the first food offered to us — some black bread and coffee — because it was not kosher. Never again, after that, did we turn down food.”
Kor and her sister became part of Mengele’s extensive genetic experiments on twins. She was injected with a substance and told that she would die soon. Her sister was held in another room and told that when Eva died, she also would be killed so that comparative autopsies could be done. But Eva didn’t die and so her sister was spared also.
Her sister was, however, used in another experiment which, Kor believes, ultimately caused her death from kidney failure.
The Kor twins were liberated in January 1945 and, finding their home empty and ransacked, moved to Israel, where Kor served in the army for eight years. In Israel she met and married an American tourist, in 1960, also a survivor of the camps, and moved with him to Terre Haute.
Now several books have been written describing Mengele’s experiments. These are based on Mengele’s own records, many of which were not destroyed, although it is likely that many are missing, lost forever, destroyed by Mengele himself or still being held somewhere.
Dr. Leon Stein, executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in Skokie, says, “Mengele kept meticulous records of the medical experiments.” He was not able to say how many of the original records still exist.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, author of “The Nazi Doctors” (Basic Books Inc., 1986) and professor of psychiatry and psychology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, says: “Mengele had a lot of different activities. He exploited the Auschwitz situation, and the records that we have are incomplete and unreliable.”
In the early 1980s Kor began trying to locate other Mengele twins to document their stories, with little success at first.
“Then it came to my mind,” she says, “I, Eva Kor, am not very important. But what if I form an organization, even if it has one person in it? So I formed C.A.N.D.L.E.S. (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) and wrote letters as president of that organization.”
This created some media exposure, and other sets of twins began coming forward. Her sister, who still lived in Israel, put an ad in an Israeli paper, and they found more twins that way.
On April 30, 1995, Kor opened the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Museum in Terre Haute devoted to educating children about the Holocaust.
“This is the only museum that specifically documents atrocities against children and describes the experience of children who have survived the death camps,” she says. “If we want to make the world a better place, we have to start working with the children at the youngest age possible that they can understand it.
“And if I can relay my story from the child’s point of view to the children, this may increase the possibility of the children growing up to be better human beings, more willing to accept everybody as equal.”
Kor also feels that it is not enough just to have survived the death camps, but that the quality of life of the survivor is also important. She says she has forgiven everyone involved in the Holocaust and thinks it would help all survivors if they could do the same. Not, she says, to ever forget, but just to forgive so that the damage that the hatred does can be lessened.
“Every survivor agrees that we must say `never again.’ But how do we reach that goal? Yes, we have to be alert to the danger signals. But there is something else. I think we have to raise our children differently. I think we have to free them from the burden of old pain, of old suffering.
“I have given my children (Alex, 34, and Rina, 32) a clean slate. They do not have to hate anybody for me; they do not have to fight any of my battles. They can judge every person on the merits of what they are doing now, not 50 years ago.
“Let’s be honest. The world has not changed that much in 50 years. Yes, we have improved communications and computers and instant news. But the human heart and the human mind are much more difficult to change.
“Prejudice and hatred, unfortunately, are still the biggest problems in the world. Many families grow up passing on to their children prejudice and hatred with the mother’s milk and the cookies that they bake. By the time they enter college, many will keep their prejudices.
“I honestly think that if the Jewish people, of all people in the world, could be the initiators of a new way of coping with old pain, and that would be the legacy of the Holocaust, the legacy of Auschwitz, it would be a wonderful thing.”
Kor has also written a book for adults about her experiences in the concentration camp and at the hands of Mengele (“Echoes from Auschwitz,” C.A.N.D.L.E.S., $30) and is trying to assemble enough information about the surviving twins to have a library at the museum that tells their stories.
Both books are available at Barnes and Noble and Walden Books, or through the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Museum, 1532 S. 3rd St., Terre Haute, Ind. 47802. Profits from the sale of the book go to the museum.
