EVA’S EPILOGUE
In Israel we lived for two years in the Youth Village. We went to school half the day and worked on the farm for the other half. We learned Hebrew quickly, within two years rapidly skipping up from one class to the next, finally finishing in the tenth grade. Miriam worked in the field, and I was a milkmaid. I was the only girl working with six guys. I learned to say “I love you” in ten different languages, which, at age sixteen, seemed like an important thing to know.
In 1952 we were drafted into the Israeli army, where Miriam studied nursing and became a registered nurse. I studied drafting and became a draftsperson, someone who draws plans of buildings or machines. I was stationed in Tel Aviv and stayed in the Israeli Army for eight years, reaching the rank of sergeant major. Those years were growing years for me. I became a very good draftswoman and I learned that I was able to earn a living. But I longed for a home and a family of my own.
In April, 1960, I met an American tourist, Michael Kor, who was visiting his brother in Tel Aviv. Even though we could hardly communicate, we got married a few weeks later. He had said something to me in English; that night I had looked it up and replied, “Yes.” It was a marriage proposal. The next thing I knew, I was a married woman living in Terre Haute, Indiana, where my husband Michael had lived since 1947. He had come there After the war specifically to live close to his liberator from the U.S. Allied Forces. Let me tell you that it is not a particularly good idea to marry someone without being able to communicate in the same language. Both of us had too many surprises to contend with while getting to know one another. For instance, he initially thought I was a very quiet person! As you might have figured out from this memoir, I am not; it was simply that I could not speak any English.
Coming from Tel Aviv to Terre Haute was like landing on the moon. I knew nothing about life in the U.S., spoke no English, and thought everyone was rich. Within a few weeks, I got pregnant. I was so very homesick, missing Miriam and my friends in Israel, that I watched TV to drown out my loneliness. At the time, I thought that all that Americans showed on TV were news and sports, because those were the only two kinds of programs that my husband watched.
One day, to my surprise, there was a movie on TV about a young couple dating, kissing, and living like young people do. Now this was a TV show worth watching! I became engrossed in the show, looking away from the action only to jot down words I did not know so I could later look them up in the dictionary. I then proceeded to memorize those words. In this way I learned to speak English well enough to get a job within three months of my arrival to the States.
Our son, Alex Kor, was born on April 15, 1961, and our daughter, Rina Kor, on March 1, 1963. I thought my life was complete. But still, my childhood experiences continued to come back to haunt me. The birthday parties started, which became a problem because my toddlers asked me how come they had no grandparents like all their friends did.
When Alex was six years old, on Halloween a very popular kid and his friends came over to play tricks on my son. Those tricks reminded me of the days when the Nazi youth harassed us in Portz, days when I was helpless and could do nothing to defend myself. But this time I lived in this great country where I did not have to put up with it! So I went outside and chased those kids away. Because of this I became very “popular” with the kids at Halloween. Every year the harassment would begin on October 1: They painted swastikas on our home and put white crosses in the yard—it was awful.
Alex would come home from school crying and saying, “Mom, I’m so ashamed of you! All the kids say that you are crazy! Why can’t you be like all the other mothers?” I told my son that I was not crazy, but neither was I like all the other mothers. I thought that if I could tell the story of what had happened to me as a child, the kids would understand and leave me alone to live in peace in my home. But as a victim of such atrocities, I did not know how to accomplish this.
I was harassed for eleven years, until 1978 when NBC aired the show “Holocaust.” Suddenly everybody understood why I was different. Those same kids who had taunted me at Halloween called me or wrote to me to apologize. I began lecturing in 1978, and people always asked me about the details of the experiments. I never knew all the details about Auschwitz, but I thought that there would be lots of information available about the camps and about Dr. Mengele. Unfortunately, I could not find any information in any book. I remembered that in the liberation film, about two hundred children were shown marching out of the camp. If I could contact those children, now adults, we could share our memories and piece together what had been done to us. But I didn’t know where to find them.
It took me six years to come up with the idea of forming an organization to help me and Miriam locate the Mengele twins. In 1984 we founded CANDLES, an acronym for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. We located 122 survivors living in ten countries and on four continents. CANDLES, as a support group, helped many twins deal with some of the special issues that we all had as survivors of Mengele’s experiments.
As time went on, Miriam had more and more problems with her kidneys. We knew it had something to do with the injections she had been given in Auschwitz, but we never found out what it was that prevented her kidneys from growing beyond the size of a ten-year-old’s. By 1987 her kidneys failed. I donated my left kidney, which helped her live until June 6, 1993. We never did find out what she or any of us had been injected with. I am still searching and hoping to discover this information.
Miriam’s death was devastating to me. I knew that I had to do something positive in her memory. So in 1995 I opened the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, in Terre Haute, Indiana. Over fifty thousand people have visited the museum since we opened its doors, most of them young people.
In 1993 I traveled to Germany and met with a Nazi doctor from Auschwitz, Dr. Münch. Surprisingly, he was very kind to me. Even more surprising, I found that I liked him. I asked him if he knew anything about the gas chambers in Auschwitz. He said that what he knew had been fueling the nightmares he lived with every single day. He went on to describe it, saying, “People would be told they were taking a shower and to remember their clothes hanger number, and to tie their shoes together. When the gas chamber was fully packed, the doors closed hermetically and sealed. A vent-like orifice opened in the ceiling, dropping pellets like gravel to the floor. Somehow the pellets operated like dry ice and turned to gas. The gas began rising from the floor. People tried to get away from the rising gas, climbing on top of one another. The strongest people ended atop a pile of intermingled bodies. When the people on the top of the pile stopped moving, that was when I knew, from looking through a peephole and watching it all, that everybody was dead.” Dr. Münch signed the mass death certificates; there were no names on them, just that there were two thousand or three thousand dead people.
I told Dr. Münch that this was very important information, for I had not known that the gas chambers worked that way. I asked him if he would come with me to Auschwitz in 1995, when we would be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of our liberation from the camp. I further asked him to sign an affidavit about what he had said and seen and done, and to do it at the site of all those killings. He said that he would love to.
So I returned from Germany, and I was so glad that I would have an original document witnessed and signed by a Nazi—a participator, not a survivor and not a liberator—to add to the historical collection of information we were preserving for ourselves and for future generations. I was so grateful that Dr. Münch was willing to come with me to Auschwitz and sign that document about the operation of the gas chambers, and I wanted to thank him. But what does one give a Nazi doctor? How can one thank a Nazi doctor?