A
Peculiar Book on the Holocaust
Eva Mozes Kor with Lisa Rojany Buccieri. The Twins of Auschwitz: The Inspiring True
Story of a Young Girl Surviving Mengele’s Hell. London: Monoray/Octopus,
2020. 209 pp. First published as
Surviving the Angel of Death . (Indianapolis,
IN: Tanglewood, 2009). Contains two maps and ten black and white photographs.
Reviewed by Norman Simms
Among the many horror
stories which constitute the history of the Holocaust, the accounts of Dr.
Josef Mengele’s medical experiments stand out for their cold-blooded cruelty.
The lack of compassion and the failure to meet minimal ethical standards of the
healing arts point towards a sadistic centre of what the Nazis, especially the
doctors and scientists who gave the programme legitimacy, set out to accomplish
as the Final Solution to the Jewish Question.
This book raises three
extremely important aesthetic, psychological and moral questions.
1.
The first is: How can there be a child’s
story about the Holocaust, especially about one of its more infamous aspects,
the unethical and cruel experiments conducted by Dr. Josef Mengele on twins at
Auschwitz?
2.
The second: How authentic is a story
about a young girl’s experiences in the clutches of such a monster that is told
through the pen of another person who wasn’t there?
3.
And the third: How can anyone,
especially one of the survivors of such horrendous crimes, forgive Mengele and
the other Nazis for what they did?
The
Twins of Auschwitz focuses on the events the two twin
girls, Eva and Miriam Mozes, underwent for about 225 pages, another 56 pages
deals with life after liberation, other voices than the narrator’s own
fictional one giving an account of the difficult and long journey to Palestine
and eventually to America.
The
story is told through Eva’s memories, occasionally touching on things that
happened to Miriam, with no sense that, as so often happened, identical twins
can feel and think in unison and, when separated, perform similar actions and
reach identical decisions. Nothing like that is spoken of in this book.
Though the experiments performed by Mengele and his team, supported by
prestigious scientists elsewhere in the Third Reich, the two girls might just
as well be sisters at different ages. Eva
thinks and feels deeply, reacts angrily at the injustices of the Nazi regime
and brings her strength of will to focus on how to survive the ordeal of the
Shoah. Miriam suffers, whimpers and follows the lead of her twin sister. Though
they are obviously too young to understand the political implications of the
Holocaust on them and their family, they also do not seem to have any inner
experiences, individually or as a pair, even many years after they return to
what is supposedly normal life, to show
any growth of understanding as they mature into adult women. If this
superficiality and concern only for actions derives from the editor—Lisa Rojany
Buccieri, who puts together the book on behalf of Eva—is this the only reason
why the book can be directed at child and adolescent audiences?
This
brings us to the problem of authenticity.
Told from the point of view of a child who is between nine and ten years old at
the time she is taken away from her family and her sense of normality, aside
from saying now and then that she was too young to make sense of it all, there
is nothing very new in the book. On occasion, the narrator—a combination of
Eva’s memories and Lisa Rojany Buccierei’s literary reconstruction—refers to
books later read and alludes to persons and events that are discussed in detail
elsewhere. Even the subtitle of the book speaks only of one of the young girls
who survived the Holocaust, not the two twin sisters who actually did. When the
narrative voice says “I” can it be trusted to express a full emotional and
psychological representation of the little girl subjected to outrageous
experiments?
When
the title claims to be about twins and yet describes itself as the “true story”
of only one, there is a problem. The phrase “twins of Auschwitz” has at its
subject the studies carried out by the Nazis in their pursuit of racial science
trough the experiments performed on hundreds of twins. Unlike legitimate
scientific examinations to determine the way both monoygotic and dizygotic
children react to shared experiences, different diseases and injuries and which
have as their goal objective knowledge, and are carried out carefully and
humanely with informed consent of parents or other guardians, the Nazi
physicians, anthropologists and ideological monitors performed their tests as
part of the Final Solution, forcibly separated the subjects of the trials from
their parents and other siblings, murdered the twins in order to carry out
immediate post-mortem dissections, or discarded them if operations did not go
as planned by sending them to the gas chamber. In addition to integrating these
experiments into the lager plans of racial hygiene conducted by leading
institutions in Berlin, pseudo-scientists like Dr. Mengele carried out wild,
unstructured and sadistic operations, such as sewing together male and female
twins, exchanging limbs between living and dead subjects, removing eyeballs and
other organs without proper anaesthetic procedures.
In
the memoirs presented in this book, there are no dreams or nightmares, no hallucinations
and no obsessive compensatory actions. There are no signs of post-traumatic
stress disorder. There are no
descriptions of hysterical weeping or neurotic symptoms. If everything is
bottled up inside of Eva’s mind, something would show, displaced into odd
behaviours, strange tics, embarrassing lapses in memory. How Eva reacted to the horrors around her are
at most muted, muffled and projected into her twin sister Miriam. The narrator
“I” speaks only of stealing herself so as not give satisfaction to the doctors,
nurses and guards she interacts with, and has no real conversations with the
other children in the twins’ house. At ten years old, Eva is determined to
survive, escape and return home.
There
is something very peculiar going on here. How can we analyse the tones of voice
that lacks anything distinctive about it, if we can be sure it belongs to a
real person at all? The clues hinted at in the patterns of the narration cannot
be measured and evaluated because the writing is, as the additional sections at
the end of the book and many reviewers of the published text say it uses very
simple language and sentence structures: just right, some commentators aver, to
be a classroom text. This at first does
not seem to be a case of deliberate falsification or a refusal to print everything
that went on in Eva’s mind and heart throughout her life or even during the
sessions in which he gave her story to the editor. But who is that? The initial
version was published eleven years prior to this with a different title How I Survived the Angel of Death by
Tanglewood Press, a company owned and edited by Peggy Tierney. Does this lead
well-intentioned censorship in an effort to keep the story at a level
appropriate for modern British or American children who have no experience of
anything like what the two sisters went through. This holds true both for
“Eva’s Epilogue” written in 2009 and for Peggy Tierney’s lengthy “Afterward”
appended in 2020.
These two extra pieces,
however, because they deal with the third problem addressed in The Twins of Auschwitz, namely, Eva’s
controversial public forgiveness of Mengele and other Nazis for the crimes they
committed, may provide the information we are looking for. The closer we look,
the more we discover something very peculiar has been going on. To virtually
everyone who learns of Eva’s forgiving act, there is shock, confusion, anger.
They say, Jews do not do such things. How could she do it? She has no right to
speak on someone else’s behalf. Who does she think she is? How dare she speak
for all those who are dead or who have survived? What is she trying to do, this
tiny, determined “woman in blue” from Terre Haute Indiana?
“Eva’s Epilogue” identified
as by Eva Mozes Kor, April 2009 may or may not be what it purports to be. By
this point we cannot be sure whether the “I” is actually the person she claims
to be. She gives a quick summary of what happened after she left the Youth
Village to sail to Israel. After two years, she meets and marries an American
visitor, Michael Kor, also a survivor, but she doesn’t speak English, and
before she knows it she finds herself in Terre Haute. Is she exaggerating?
Though the marriage does last, she cautions other young women about rushing
into situations where they cannot communicate well and discovering only
later—too late?—basic facts about each other’s past and personalities. She felt
like she “was landing on the moon” when she found herself in the American
Mid-West, and “within a few weeks was pregnant.” She goes through culture
shock. Then she has two children. In a sense, many young women rush into
marriage and only learn about their husbands when it is too late.
Something else,
however, is important, something that makes her different from most other young
women in America at that time, and that is that she is a Holocaust survivor.
She says, “my childhood experiences continued to come back to haunt me.” Is
this the clue to the missing information in the main body of this book?
She had remarked that one of the
misunderstandings her husband had about her, that she was a quiet person was
due only to her inability to express herself in English. B y the time her son
Alex (named after her father who was murdered in Auschwitz) is six years old,
that problem has been solved. When children query why there are no
grandparents, when school friends use anti-Semitic terms to mock her boys, when
local gangs paint swastikas in her yard, Eva does what she couldn’t do in her
own childhood: she fights back and chases the offenders away. Yet there is no
peace and the harassment goes on for eleven years. How deeply her pains are
locked into her repressed memory is only hinted at in these vague terms.
She is then invited to
speak about her experiences during the Shoah on NBC. In 1978 she begins to give
little talks to local community groups. This is the beginning of facing up to
what had actually happened to her. Until then she still saw the past through
the eyes and mind of a very young child. She starts to do research, to read
books about the Holocaust and but about Dr. Mengele’s experiments she finds
little or nothing. She is no scholar and she still has to confront, still
unconsciously, the demons in her own mind that are painful and shameful and
inexpressible: the things that do not appear in the life story that forms the “inspiring
true story of a young girl”. The things,
that is, that have been censored out from a book meant to be read by children
in a school setting, with whatever teacher guidance there may be. The things,
too, that are censored out of her own conscious memory and for which she does
not have an adult’s English vocabulary, only the words in Hungarian and German
as a young girl.
Another six years pass
and then she has the idea to form an organization of other child survivors of
Auschwitz who were part of the experiments on twins conducted by Mengele and
his team of Nazi doctors. CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab
Experiments Survivors) gathers 122 members, and it is mentioned in David
Marwell’s recent book on the tracking down of Josef Mengele in South America
and the long search to find out if he is dead or alive. Eva and her group keep
prodding the international investigators not to give up their search until they
can prove beyond reasonable doubt that the Angel of Death is well and truly
dead, and died never regretting or even acknowledging the reality of his
crimes.
In forming CANDLES, Eva
says she was acting on behalf of herself and her twin sister Miriam. Especially
after her sister’s death in 1993 due to kidney failure, probably a consequence
of the experiments carried out on her as a child in Auschwitz, “I had to do
something positive in her memory.” That is just about all that is said about
Miriam. Eva goes on to set up a Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre
Haute,
and she goes around more and more, and further and further afield, including
with study groups to Auschwitz itself. As she meets with fellow child survivors
and listens to their stories, she learns what she didn’t know during her time
in the Twin House that Mengele ran, and what she hadn’t been able to find in
books on the Shoah. She is also deeply impressed by a former doctor on the
experimental team, Dr. Hans Münch. He
had come to realize what he had done and was willing to sign documents and join
her in her lecture tours to verify the awful details of the crimes committed.
She wants to do something positive for him, as she did for her sister. “But
what does one give a Nazi doctor? How can one thank a Nazi doctor?”
After ten months
pondering this question, she makes a decision and opens not so much a Pandora’s
Box, where there is always hope remaining after the horrible diseases and
catastrophes that beset human life are released into the world by the
unthinking recipient of this gift; but a can of worms, the proverbial and banal
figure for an act that sends out into the world filthy, slimy things that ought
to have been kept locked away. She forgives a Nazi, then not just any Nazi or
all Nazis, but the infamous Dr. Mengele.
Shocking as that it is,
we have to remember that Eva and CANDLES did not want the pursuit of Dr Mengele
to end and she was always ready to testify against the Nazis and their
despicable actions. Forgiveness did not mean pardoning them for their crimes or
not having them punished. Moreover, she always said that the forgiveness was
her own; she did not and could not speak for any other victims.
She didn’t anticipate
what the reaction would be. She viewed her act as one that releases her from
pain deep inside herself, that gives her the power she never had to judge the
actions of those who did such terrible things to her and her family, against
their will. She thinks,”[I]t makes me feel good that I can do that. I have the
power, and I am not hurting anyone with it.” She then goes on for three pages
justifying this action, claiming that with this action she ceases to be a
victim of the Holocaust, and is able to climb over a mountain of despair into a
beautiful flowery valley of peace and joy. This self-delusion goes on and on,
and she is tone deaf to the pain she causes others, the reasonable arguments
against such a foolhardy and dangerous deed. Naively she believes in her heart
that if others would do the same, forgiving their worst enemies, there will be
an end to hatred, an end to war, “no more Auschwitzes.” On this note, Eva Mozes
Kor ends her Epilogue.
But that is not the
end. There is one more additional section to the book, a much longer “Afterword”
by Peggy Tierney written eleven hears later in April 2020, almost a year after
Eva’s death on 4 July 2019. In some ways, Tierney, who had published Eva’s
memoirs in her own local Tanglewood Press in 2009, tries to explain or explain
away the bizarre act of forgiveness. Some points are made clear here that were
confused in the memoir, and other things are made more confusing,
The Afterword opens
with what seems like a clarification:
Eva Kor’s memoir
was first published in 2009, and Lisa Rajani Buccieri captured Eva’s voice and
story as she wanted it to be told. The first person narrative provides insight
into what Eva was thinking and feeling, but it doesn’t necessarily convey what
it was like to know Eva, the events in the last ten years of her life, and the
stories behind the stories, both positive and negative.
The
contradiction is glaring. If Buccieri “captured” Eva’s voice and story “as she
wanted it to be told,” then why does not “convey what it is like to know Eva”?
Could it be that, on the one hand, Eva didn’t want to be known in the way her
friends thought knew her; while, on the other, all that happened during the ten
years of their friendship with her belong to some other part of memory and mind
that Eva didn’t want to convey and have captured. What Tierney and Buccieri
believe they know about “the stories behind the stories, both positive and
negative” are not what Eva wanted to put in her book—nor what she wanted these
two friends to know, or anyone else, perhaps not even her own self. Though speaking about her eccentric choice of
always wearing “a printed vest topped with a blue vest,” Eva declared “I am
somebody because of who I am inside.” She wears this “signature” costume
because, again in the words remembered by Tierney, “it is simpler to dress in a
uniform. I don’t have to waste any more time and effort on it. I do not like to
wear black, my topic is too dark, and I like to liven up my appearance.”
What
does this mean? The blue sash and top are similar to the dress that nuns made
her war to wear when she was sent to a convent in Katowice, scene of a terrible
massacre not mentioned by Eva. She and Miriam had uniforms, too, when they were
young at home and when they first went to the concentration camp: matching
burgundy dresses made by their mother and which always reminded them of home.
But why does she prefer not to wear black clothing? Her memories are too dark,
she says; but also, what she doesn’t say, Nazi uniforms were black. But so were
the clothes of strictly religious Jews like her father. There are indeed
stories behind the stories, complicated stories, but we are not told what they
are. This is partly because she doesn’t want to tell them, and also partly
because she doesn’t know how to tell them—or even know them at all.
Tierney
points out that Eva survived “could be stubborn, single-minded, willing to do
or say something people might not like.” In this she was like her father. “Eva
acknowledged that her father’s harshness prepared her for the camp” where nice
people, honest people and soft people did not survive. She also learned from
her parents that “secrecy and denials” are not just tactics you have to expect
from adults, but they too are tools for survival. The naïve and the gullible
don’t last long in a concentration camp, or out in the wider world where there
are still massacres and anti-Semitic acts, like the cruel words her
six-year-old learned in kindergarten or the neighbours who painted swastikas on
her fence in Terre Haute.
Thus
for her forgiveness became a weapon against the Nazis she was forgiving. It
gave her power. At the same time, it hurt other survivors who could not
understand what she was doing. She was not being nice to her fellow survivors,
even while she was helping them and giving them strength to carry on pursuing
Mengele and his minions. She forced the Nazis to feel insecure; she was not
going to stop exposing them. The victims of the twin-heredity experiments
“received an apology from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute ” to which Dr Mengele
sent his samples and who served as an assistant in the project of racial
hygiene. She was a bundle of apparent contradictions. This was her disguise,
her uniform, her way of overcoming pain. Yet, when she found her peers in
CANDLES unwilling to join her in the act of forgiveness,
She often became
frustrated with survivors who she felt were suffering needlessly, sometimes
coming across as berating them or even criticizing them for not trying her
forgiveness—unfairly, as her son, Alex, acknowledged. That also caused some to
question her motivations.
The
pain also didn’t disappear from inside her, much as she claimed that it did and
that forgiveness was a useful psychological weapon to use against the Nazis. As
for the German people who she learned from a few casual conversations also
suffered pain for their countrymen and government had done. She wanted to
forgive them too. In one sense, these are noble gestures, but in another they
are empty and give ammunition to the anti-Semites looking to still hurt Jews
and to exploit their weaknesses.
In
her view, she or any other survivor would be doomed to a life of anger and
suffering if they were required to wait for an apology that would never come.
Eva insisted that the right to be happy, to be free from pain, should be viewed
as a universal human right.
The
problem here—and there are so many—that what happened is more than a breaking
of some law, however nobly framed in a Declaration of Human Rights; it is a
deep violation of each person’s right to be a human being, and the pains and
humiliations and grief caused cannot be willed away. They are traumatic
injuries and they never go away, not for the individual, not for their
families, not for the whole human race. She believed that “children with their
beautiful minds” would be able to overcome these traumatic injuries. That is
what she believed, and no one has the right to question her beliefs.
According
to accounts of Terre Haute residents, Eva was an angry and bitter woman before
she forgave, all agreed that she seemed to be a very different person
afterwards. This conversion is almost religious and it is hard for an outsider
to judge how successful it was. If she “seemed to be a very different person
afterwards,” perhaps she was—and perhaps she was deluding herself. She also
lectured another lesson: to fight against hatred with humour. She was happiest,
they say, when she was leading groups through the concentration camps. “The
Nazis are dead,” she would say, “I am alive.” That is a cosmic moral joke, in a way. Here is
another, a very dark and painful Jewish joke, that she recounts (if these are
her own words) in her memoirs about a dream—the only one she writes about—she
had in Cluj, Romania waiting to be allowed into Israel:
Every night I
had nightmares. I dreamed of rats the size of cats, dead bodies, and needles
stuck into me. After we found out that the Nazis had made soap out of Jewish
fat, I dreamed that soap bars spoke to me in the voices of my parents and
sisters, asking me, “Why are you washing with us?”
Selected
References
Anonymous. “Eva Kor
Obituary: Survivor of Nazi Experiments on Twins at Auschwitz” Irish Times (13 July 2013) online at https://www/irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/eva-kor-obituarty-survivor-of-nazi-experiments
-on-twins-at-auschwitz-1.3954897.
Fernandes, Ashley
K. “Why Did So Many Doctors Become
Nazis?” Tablet Magazine (10 December
2020)
Marwell, David G. Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death”.
New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.
Piontelli, Alessandra, Luisa Bocconui, Chiara Boschettro, Alessandra
Kustermann and Umberto Nicolini. “Differences and
Similarities in the Intra-Uterine Behaviour of Monozygotic and Dizygotic Twins”
Twin Research 2 (1999) 264-273.
Vice, Sue. Textual Deceptions: False Memoirs and
Literary Hoaxes in the Contemporary Era (Edinburgh” Edinburgh University
Press, 2014).
Walker, Andy. “The
Twins of Auschwitz” BBC News Magazine
(28 January 2015) online at https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30933718
