The cattle car doors opened,
thousands of people poured out.
Everything was moving very fast.
And I in my childish curiosity, I looked around,
trying to figure out what on earth is this place.
Then I realized that my father and two older sisters
disappeared in the crowd.
Never, ever did I see them again.
A Nazi was running
in the middle of the selection platform,
very clearly yelling in German, "Twins! Twins!"
He noticed Miriam and me,
and he demanded to know if we were twins.
And my mother said yes.
At that moment, another Nazi appear from nowhere,
pulled my mother to the right, and I can see
still as my mother's arms
were stretching out toward us,
and she was pulled away.
There was so much pain in her eyes.
That is the last image that I have of my mother.
I didn't even understand that that would happen
because I might have done something to run back
to my mother and say goodbye.
Once we were processed, we were taken to our barrack.
Crude and filthy, modular horse barns.
There on the floor
were the scattered corpses of three children.
I have never ever seen anybody dead before.
But the message to me was clear
that in this place children were dying.
So right then and there, I made a silent pledge
that I will do anything and everything within my power
to make sure that Miriam and I shall not end up
on that floor.
That we will somehow survive
and walk out of this camp alive.
- In the morning, they were awakened by a visit
from the so-called "Angel of Death".
Dr. Joseph Mengele.
- We've were Mengele twins.
Mengele would count us every morning.
And he wanted to know how many
guinea pigs he had this day.
They would take us to a blood lab.
They would tie both of my arms,
take a lot of blood from my left arm,
and give me a minimum of five injections
in the right arm.
The content of those injections, we didn't know.
After one of the visits to the lab, I became extremely ill.
I tried very hard to hide the fact that I was ill,
but instead of tying my arms,
they took me to a side room, measure my fever.
And I knew I was in trouble.
Mengele came in with five other doctors,
looked at my fever chart, and declared, laughing,
"Too bad. She's so young.
She has only two weeks to live."
I knew he was right, but I refused to die.
If I died, Miriam would have been given
a lethal injection
so he could cut open both of our bodies
and compare the autopsies.
For the first two weeks, I was between life and death.
I remember most of the time
waking up on the barrack floor
as I was crawling because I couldn't walk.
And even in semi-conscious state of mind,
I kept telling myself, I must survive.
I must survive.
I would fade in and out of consciousness.
It took me another three weeks
before my fever chart showed normal.
Miriam, when I got back, she was sitting on the bed,
staring into space.
When I asked her, "What happened to you?"
She said, "I cannot talk about it.
I will not talk about it."
- By January 1945,
the Nazis were on the brink of defeat,
and most of the Auschwitz prisoners
had been force-marched to other camps.
Eva and Miriam were among those left behind.
On January 27th, the Russians came.
- There were 180 children
among the freed prisoners at Auschwitz.
And they were now expected
to overcome the Auschwitz nightmare.
- After the war,
Miriam was always weaker and sicker than I was.
Years later, she developed severe kidney infections
that did not respond to any antibiotic.
And they found out that
Miriam's kidneys never grew larger.
They're the size of a 10 year old child.
Her kidneys started to deteriorate.
The doctors kept asking me to find our Auschwitz files.
- Eva was determined to discover
what had been done to her and Miriam.
What they had been injected with, especially Miriam.
- It was very, very important, life savingly important.
- She reached out to major newspapers,
magazines, and television networks
in the United States.
No one replied.
- And guess what?
Nobody cared.
I was doing everything I could do
to find as much information
about Mengele's experiments.
I did not end up with a lot of results.
- In the fall of that year,
Eva flew to Israel to donate a kidney to her ailing sister.
As Miriam's condition continued to deteriorate,
the fight to find Mengele, or at least his files,
took on an air of desperation.
In 1993, Miriam Mozes died of cancer
related to her kidney problems.
- It was pain, a lot of pain and a lot of anger.
Nobody understood it.
Maybe even today nobody understands it.
But I couldn't give up.
I can't ever give up on the truth.
- Searching for answers
would become a lifelong mission.
- How fast we forget?
Where is the press?
Four years ago we were in this building.
The world seem to show us that they cared.
I accuse the world of stopping to care.
- Isolated by her confusion and rage
about what had happened to her,
Eva suffered tremendously.
- Eva was at rock bottom.
Then one day, she had an epiphany.
- I remember that the last project that Miriam and I
worked together before she died,
it was a documentary done by German television
about the Mengele twins.
And in that documentary,
there was a Nazi doctor from Auschwitz.
So August of 1993,
I am heading to Germany to meet the Nazi doctor.
I was so scared, but I remembered about Nazi doctors.
I did not want to experience again.
- Eva had her own agenda
and was disappointed when Münch
said he had never worked with Mengele
and had no idea where his files were.
However, Münch had more to say.
- He was stationed outside the gas chambers.
And when people were dead,
he would sign one death certificate.
No names, just the number of people
who were murdered.
And he said to me, "This is my problem.
This is a nightmare that I live with."
And he was extremely remorseful
that he was part of that regime.
I asked him if he was willing to go with me to Auschwitz
and make the same statement that he made to me.
And he said he would love to.
And I wanted to thank this Nazi doctor
for his willingness to document the gas chambers.
I didn't know how to thank the Nazi.
I didn't tell anybody about it
because even to me, it sounded strange.
I didn't want anybody to change my mind.
After 10 months, one morning I woke up,
and the following simple idea popped into my head.
How about a letter of forgiveness
from me to Dr. Münch?
So I wanted my former English professor
to correct my spelling.
So I called her.
She said to me, "Now Eva, very nice.
you forgive this Dr. Münch.
Your problem is not with Dr. Münch.
Your problem is with Dr. Mengele."
I was not quite ready to forgive Mengele.
I never ever thought that I would ever forgive anybody.
Miriam, the day that you left this world,
I was not prepared to live in a world without you.
When I got home, actually I picked up a dictionary
and wrote down 20 nasty words,
which I read clear and loud
to the make believe Mengele in the room.
And at the end, I said,
"In spite of all that, I forgive you."
What I discovered for myself was life changing.
I discovered that I had the power to forgive.
That I, the little guinea pig of 50 years,
even had the power over
the angel of death of Auschwitz.
As a victim of almost 50 years,
I never thought that I had any power over my life.
I felt free.
Free from Auschwitz, free from Mengele.
- And so on the 50th anniversary
of the liberation of Auschwitz,
Eva Mozes Kor returned once again,
this time armed, not with anger, but peace.
- No more wars, no more gas chambers,
no more bombs, no more hatred,
no more killing, and no more Auschwitz.
Forgiveness is nothing more and nothing less
but an act of self-healing, an act of self-empowerment.
Pain was lifted from my shoulder
that I was no longer a victim of Auschwitz,
that I was no longer a prisoner of my tragic past,
that I was finally free.
All victims, all hurt,
feel hopeless, feel helpless, feel powerless.
I want everybody to remember
that we cannot change what happened.
That is the tragic part.
But we can change how we relate to it.
Forgive your worst enemy.
It will heal your soul, and it will set you free.