Forgiving Dr. Mengele is a 2006 documentary film about Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of the Holocaust, and Dr. Josef Mengele and his staff, who experimented on her and her twin sister Miriam Mozes, as well as approximately 1,400 other twin pairs. The documentary was directed by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh, who also served as producers. They followed Kor for over four years, chronicling her story, including her pilgrimage to Israel.
Eva Mozes Kor and her sister Miriam were born on January 30, 1934 in Porț, Kingdom of Romania. In 1944, Nazis transported her immediate family to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Because Eva and Miriam were twins, Dr. Mengele selected them to remain alive for experiments.
After a 70-hour ride without food or water, Eva and Miriam, along with their mother, arrived at the selection platform. Eva gripped her mother's hand and looked around: her father and her two older sisters were nowhere in sight. She never saw them again. Soon the twin girls were ripped from their mother, whom they also never saw again.
Kor later recalled how she and her family arrived at the Auschwitz railhead:
When the doors to our cattle car opened, I heard SS soldiers yelling, "Schnell! Schnell!" (Quick!), and ordering everybody out. My mother grabbed Miriam and me by the hand. She was always trying to protect us because we were the youngest. Everything was moving very fast, and as I looked around, I noticed my father and my two older sisters were gone. As I clutched my mother's hand, an SS man hurried by shouting, "Twins! Twins!" He stopped to look at us. Miriam and I looked very much alike. "Are they twins?" he asked my mother. "Is that good?" she replied. He nodded yes. "They are twins," she said ... Once the SS guard knew we were twins, Miriam and I were taken away from our mother, without any warning or explanation. Our screams fell on deaf ears. I remember looking back and seeing my mother's arms stretched out in despair as we were led away by a soldier. That was the last time I saw her..
Eva and Miriam remained in Auschwitz for nine months, enduring experimentation such as being injected with potentially lethal strains of bacteria (and not given treatment). After World War II, they went to Romania and then immigrated to Israel. Eva served in the Israeli Army for ten years. After meeting a tourist who was a Holocaust survivor living in the United States, the two were married, and she moved to the US. In Terre Haute, Indiana, they raised a family and she became a successful realtor and created the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Museum (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiment Survivors). The museum is dedicated to education about the Holocaust and operates under the mission to "eliminate hatred and prejudice from our world." Eva Kor's husband, Michael, is a pharmacist, and her son, Alex, is active in the museum and education. He has made trips to Auschwitz on his mother's behalf and has documented these experiences.
Josef Mengele, also known as the Angel of Death was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II. He is mainly remembered for his actions at the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he performed deadly experiments on prisoners, and was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be killed in the gas chambers and was one of the doctors who administered the gas. With Red Army troops sweeping through Poland, Mengele was transferred 280 kilometres (170 mi) from Auschwitz to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp on 17 January 1945, just 10 days before the arrival of the Soviet forces at Auschwitz.
Margot Elisabeth Dreschel, also spelled Drechsler, or Drexler, was a prison guard at Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
The Ovitz family was a family of Hungarian Jewish actors/traveling musicians originating from present Romania, who survived imprisonment at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Most of them were dwarfs. They were the largest family of dwarfs ever recorded and were the largest family to enter Auschwitz and survive intact; the family of twelve ranged from a 15-month-old baby to a 58-year-old woman.
There is a wide range of ways in which people have represented the Holocaust in popular culture.
The March of the Living is an annual educational program which brings students from around the world to Poland, where they explore the remnants of the Holocaust. On Holocaust Memorial Day observed in the Jewish calendar, thousands of participants march silently from Auschwitz to Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex built during World War II.
Eduard Wirths was the Chief SS doctor (SS-Standortarzt) at the Auschwitz concentration camp from September 1942 to January 1945. Thus, Wirths had formal responsibility for everything undertaken by the nearly 20 SS doctors who worked in the medical sections of Auschwitz between 1942–1945.
Olga Horak is a Czechoslovakian-born Australian author and Holocaust survivor.
Hans Wilhelm Münch was a German Nazi Party member who worked as an SS doctor during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1943 to 1945 in German occupied Poland.
Miklós Nyiszli was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered as a doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he operated on and tried to help the ill with only the most basic medical supplies and tools. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.
Eva Mozes Kor was a Romanian-born survivor of the Holocaust. Along with her twin sister Miriam, Kor was subjected to human experimentation under the direction of SS Doctor Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II. Her parents and two older sisters were killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau; only she and Miriam survived.
Menachem Z. Rosensaft an attorney in New York and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors, is a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of survivors. He has been described on the front page of The New York Times as one of the most prominent of the survivors' sons and daughters. He has served as National President of the Labor Zionist Alliance, and was active in the early stages of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As psychologist Eva Fogelman has written: "Menachem Rosensaft's moral voice has gone beyond the responsibility he felt as a child of survivors to remember and educate. He felt the need to promote peace and a tolerant State of Israel as well. He wanted to bring to justice Nazi war criminals, to fight racism and bigotry, and to work toward the continuity of the Jewish people".
During the Holocaust, children were especially vulnerable to death under the Nazi regime. According to estimations, 1.5 million children, nearly all Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly or as a direct consequence of Nazi actions.
Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners, including children, by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps in the early to mid 1940s, during World War II and the Holocaust. Chief target populations included Romani, Sinti, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs, disabled Germans, and Jews from across Europe.
Oskar Gröning was a German SS Unterscharführer who was stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. His responsibilities included counting and sorting the money taken from prisoners, and he was in charge of the personal property of arriving prisoners. On a few occasions he witnessed the procedures of mass killing in the camp. After being transferred from Auschwitz to a combat unit in October 1944, Gröning surrendered to the British at the end of the war; his role in the SS was not discovered. He was eventually transferred to Britain as a prisoner of war and worked as a farm labourer.
CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center is a museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, which educates the public about the Holocaust. The museum was founded by Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor, who with her twin sister Miriam was subjected to human experimentation under Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. The museum tells the story of the genocide from Kor's perspective. It has been the center of controversy due to Kor's belief that Nazis should be forgiven for the crimes of the Holocaust as a way for Jews to free themselves from victimization. It was firebombed by an unknown arsonist in 2003, and reopened two years later.
Wilhelm Rudolf Mann was a German factory manager for IG Farben and later with Bayer.
Jona Laks is an Israeli Holocaust survivor who was subject to human experimentation by Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the war she founded and served as chairwoman of the Organization of the Mengele Twins. In January 2015 she addressed the United Nations General Assembly at its International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust Memorial Ceremony. She has been featured in several documentary films.
Lisa Rojany is an American author, editor and publishing executive.
Edith Eva (Edie) Eger born to Hungarian Jewish parents, is a psychologist practicing in the United States. She is a Holocaust survivor and a specialist in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Her memoirs entitled The Choice - Embrace the Possible, published in 2017, became an international bestseller. Her second book, titled The Gift - 12 Lessons to Save Your Life was published in September 2020.
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