by Chris Tarver
Holocaust survivor Eva Kor shared her terrifying story Tuesday night of torture and humiliation at the Auschwitz death camp.
A packed audience listened in utter silence as Kor told of her experience as a young girl in Auschwitz under Dr. Josef Mengele, who was known as the “Angel of Death.”
Kor said she doesn’t have many vivid and detailed memories of Auschwitz. She does, however, remember the spring day in 1944 at age 10 when her life changed forever.
That day was the last time she saw her parents and two of her three sisters. Kor and her identical twin, Miriam Kor, were used for experimentation. Kor described how she was held down and had the identifying mark of A-7063 branded into her arm. After a couple of days in the camp, Kor made her first silent pledge — to keep her and her sister alive. She had only one objective and that was to simply survive.
Kor recalled that in early summer of 1944, she was injected with an unknown germ after a visit to Mengele’s lab. She eventually became ill and was taken to a hospital and assigned to a barrack that she described as “the barrack of the living dead.”
She came up with that moniker because people either die in the barrack or wait to be escorted to the gas chambers.
Kor was told that she only had two weeks to live by Mengele. That was when she made her second silent pledge, which was to get better and reunite with her sister. She also remembers being too weak to walk and having to crawl just to get to a nearby water fountain.
While Kor was in the hospital, her sister became even more ill than Kor. Kor’s only objective was to “organize,” or steal, food to help her sister get well. Miriam died in 1993 from a rare form of cancer caused by Mengele’s experiments.
Three times a week the doctors would perform experiments that weren’t harmful or deadly, but they were unbelievably demeaning and humiliating.
Onetime during a raid, Kor remembers staring down the barrel of an automatic rifle. Kor said she must have had a guardian angel looking over her because she fainted before the bullet struck her.
On Jan. 27, 1945, just 12 days before her 11th birthday, Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz.
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Source: media.www.collegian.com/media/storage/paper864/news/2005/03/02/Newscampus/Holocaust.Survivor.Shares.Story.Of.Horror.Forgiveness-1706408.shtml