Surviving the Angel of Death

The True Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz

Eva Mozes Kor, Lisa Rojany Buccieri

• Publisher: Tanglewood
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781939100528

Eva Mozes Kor was just ten years old when she arrived in Auschwitz. While her parents and two older sisters were taken to the gas chambers, she and her twin, Miriam, were herded into the care of the man known as the Angel of Death, Dr. Josef Mengele. Subjected to sadistic medical experiments, she was forced to fight daily for her and her twin's survival. In this incredible true story written for young adults, readers learn of a child's endurance and survival in the face of truly extraordinary evil and Eva's recovery and her controversial but often misunderstood decision to publicly forgive the Nazis. Readers will learn of how she triumphed over unfathomable pain and suffering into a life-long work for peace, human rights, and Holocaust education.The new edition provides interesting details and important context to the events related in the original story. A new Afterword by publisher Peggy Porter Tierney offers a richer portrayal of Eva as a person, the truth behind the controversies, and the eventful last ten years of her life.

CHAPTER ONE

Miriam and I were born on January 31, 1934, in the village of Portz in Transylvania, Romania, which is in Eastern Europe near the border of Hungary and the beautiful Carpathian Mountains. The scenic countryside is still dotted with small villages, and life hasn’t changed dramatically since I was a child, compared to much of the world. There was no running water or electricity, and people traveled by horse and wagon; a mode of transportation that some people still use in present-day Romania. The village was run by a notary who acted something like a mayor.

Both my father and mother came from Jewish families. It was rare for people to marry outside of their faith. In those days, marriages were arranged, and my father sent some friends to other villages to find prospective wives. According to the practice then followed by most Hungarians and Romanians, the friends put on their best clothes and carried a stick with a flower on it. If a marriageable woman was willing to meet the man, they took the flower off the stick. My mother accepted the flower, and friends and family made marriage arrangements, after which my mother finally met my father. My father was a fairly nice-looking man and wealthy for our area and time. My mother was only twenty-three years old, but that was considered ancient to be unmarried, practically an old maid. After they married, they decided to settle on my father’s vast farm, most of which he bought from his brothers and sisters.

Miriam and I were identical twins, the youngest of four sisters. My sister, Aliz, had pretty green eyes and jet black hair. She was very artistic and sang beautifully. My other older sister, Edit, was the kindest sister that anyone could have asked for. She would pick us up from behind and twirl us around in circles for as long as we wanted.

To hear my older sisters grudgingly tell the story of our birth, you would have known immediately that we two were the darlings of the family. What is sweeter or cuter than identical twin girls? But I was born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, the wrong gender, and the wrong religion.

From the time we were babies, our mother loved to dress us in the same clothes, putting huge bows in our hair so people would know right away that we were twins. She even seated us on the windowsill of our home; passersby thought we were precious dolls, not even real people.

We looked so much alike that Mama had to put tags on us to tell us apart. Aunts, uncles, and cousins visiting our farm liked to play guessing games with us, trying to divine who was who. “Which one is Miriam? Which one is Eva?” a puzzled uncle would muse with a twinkle in his eye. My mother would smile proudly at her perfect little dolls, and my two older sisters would probably groan. Regardless, most people guessed wrong. When we were older and in school, we would use our identical twinship to trick people, which for us could be so much fun. And we took advantage of how precious and unique we were whenever we could.

Although Papa was strict and admonished us and our mother about the perils of excessive vanity, emphasizing that even the Bible warned against it, Mama particularly cared about our appearance. She had our clothes custom made just for us, ordering beautiful fabric from the city. When it arrived, she would take Miriam and me and our two older sisters, Edit and Aliz, to the house of a seamstress in the nearby village of Szeplak. There, we girls were permitted to hungrily peruse magazines featuring models wearing the latest styles. But our mother made the final decision on the cut and color of our dresses, for in those days girls always wore dresses, never pants or overalls like boys. Always our mother chose burgundy, powder blue, and pink for Miriam and me. After we were measured, we would set a date for a fitting and when we returned, the seamstress had the dresses ready for us to try on. The styles and colors of the dresses were always identical, two pieces made into one perfect, matching pair. The last dresses she made would save our lives.

Other people may have been baffled by our identical twinship, not being able to know who was who, but our father could tell Miriam and me apart by our personalities. By the way I carried my body, a gesture I would make, or the second I opened my mouth to speak, it was clear to him who was who. Although my sister had been born first, I was the leader. I was also outspoken. Any time we needed to ask Papa for something, my oldest sister Edit would encourage me to be the one to approach him.

My father, a religious Jew, had always wanted a boy. At that time only a son could participate in public worship and say Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, upon someone’s death. But Papa had no son, only my sisters and me. Since I was the younger of the twins and his last child, he often looked at me and said, “You should have been a boy.” I think he meant to say that I was his last chance at getting a boy. My personality didn’t help: I was strong and brave and more outspoken—just like he must have imagined a son of his might have been.

This stronger personality of mine, while setting me apart, also had its downside. It seemed to me that my father believed everything about me was wrong; nothing I did appeared to please him. Many a time we would argue and debate, and I was not willing to give in. It was not enough of an answer for me that my father was right just because he was a man and my father and the head of the household. So we always seemed to be disagreeing, Papa and I.

I definitely got more attention from him than Miriam or my other sisters, but it was not always the kind of attention I wanted. I never learned to skirt the edge of the truth with little white lies, so I was always in trouble. I can recall tiptoeing around the house to avoid my father sometimes, as I am sure he often tired of me and my big mouth.

Looking back, however, I realize that my battles with Papa toughened me up, made me even stronger. I learned to outsmart authority. These battles with my father unwittingly prepared me for what was to come.

My mother was very different from my father. She took us shopping in our best horse and buggy, and she read to us from story books. She loved to sing and would always do so when she ironed, a habit I adopted in my own adult life—it made a tedious chore much more pleasant. She would give us garden plots and create a contest for which plot produced the best vegetables. It was a great motivator to keep us trying to do better, to work harder.

Mama was quite educated for a woman of those times, because not all women got to go to school. Especially among religious Jews in those days, girls and women were mostly expected to take care of the home and the family, while the education and studying was reserved for the boys. And while my mother made sure that we learned to read, write, and do math, along with studying history and languages, she also taught us to care for others in our community.

We were the only Jewish family in Portz, our village, and were friendly with everyone. My mother was the kindest person I ever knew. She heard all the town news and often assisted our neighbors, especially young pregnant mothers in times of need. She would take them noodles or cake, help them with the household if they were sick, give them advice on raising children, and read them instructions or letters from other family members. She taught me and my sisters to follow in her lead, serving those less fortunate, especially since we were better off than many other people in our small farming village.

There were always community events in the village. Some were work events, and we always helped. In the fall, there would be corn-husking parties. At other times, villagers would gather in the barn to beat seeds from sunflowers. We would tell each other stories and share the latest village gossip. There were also frequent dances, when local musicians played in barns, often ours. If a stranger came through town and had no place to stay, we always offered a room at our home.

Yet almost from the time we were born, antisemitism pervaded our country of Romania. That means that many people around us did not like Jewish people just because they were Jewish. We children were never aware of the antisemitism until 1940, when the Hungarian army came.

My father once told us of an antisemitic incident that happened to him in 1935 when Miriam and I were just one year old. In that year, the Iron Guard—a violent, antisemitic, political party that controlled the village offices, the police, and the newspapers—stirred up hatred against Jews by making up false stories about how evil Jewish people were, and how Jews wanted to cheat everyone else and take over the world. My father and his brother, Aaron, were thrown into jail by the Romanian Iron Guard on fake charges of not paying taxes. It was all a lie; they had always paid their taxes. They were singled out and arrested just because they were Jewish.

Papa told us that when he and Uncle Aaron got out of jail, they decided to go to Palestine to see if they could make a living there. Palestine, at the time, was an area of land in the Middle East where the Jewish people lived before their exile during the time of the Roman Empire; especially during periods of persecution, it was always thought of as a homeland by many Jews. A part of Palestine had been settled by Jewish immigrants early in the twentieth century, and it eventually became the independent state of Israel in 1948.

My father and Uncle Aaron stayed in Palestine a few months and then came back to Romania. Upon their return, Uncle Aaron and his wife sold all their land and possessions and planned to emigrate, or move.

Papa urged Mama to leave and settle in Palestine, too. “It’s good there,” he said. “The country is warm. There are plenty of jobs.”

“No,” she protested. “I can’t move with four small children.”

“We need to leave now, before it gets worse here for us,” urged my father, who was worried about the news he was hearing of increasing persecution of the Jews all over Hungary throughout other countries in Europe.

“What would I do there? How would we manage? I have no desire to live in the desert,” said my mother. And like mothers sometimes do, she put her foot down and refused to go. I often wondered what our lives would have been like had she relented.

In our little village in Romania, we lived in a nice house on a vast farm. We had thousands of acres of crops: wheat, corn, beans, and potatoes. We had cows and sheep, from which we produced cheese and milk. We had a large vineyard and produced wine. We had acres of orchards, giving us apples, plums, peaches, and juicy cherries in three colors: red, black, and white. In the summer, those cherries became our beautiful earrings when we pretended we were fancy, dressed-up ladies. Mama also loved her flower garden in front of the house and her vegetable garden in back, and her cows, chickens, and geese.

But what concerned her most was leaving behind her own mother. We children loved to visit Grandma and Grandpa Hersh. And my mother, as an only daughter, felt responsible for taking care of Grandma Hersh, who was not in the best of health and often needed Mama to look after her.

“Besides, we are safe here,” said my mother. She really believed that the rumors of Jews being persecuted by the Germans and their new head of state, Adolf Hitler, were just that: rumors. She saw no need to flee to Palestine or America, places of safety for Jewish people like us. So we stayed in Portz.

Portz, a largely Christian village of one hundred families, had a minister. The minister’s daughter, Luci, was our best friend; both Miriam and I loved playing with her. In the summer we climbed trees in the orchard, read stories, and put on plays in a little theater we made by stringing up a sheet between two trees. In the winter we even helped Luci decorate her Christmas tree—we did not tell our father because he would not have approved. Our friendship also added to our feelings of safety. We were best friends with the Christian minister’s daughter. How could we be persecuted in our own home town?

Though rumors of Jews being deported to labor camps began to spread here and there, Mama did not believe we were in danger. Even when we heard of the new ghettos—restricted areas of European towns where Jews were forced to live so they could be controlled in squalor and poverty—we did not believe we were really in any danger. Even when Jews were stripped of all possessions, all freedoms, sent away to labor camps and driven to work for no pay like slaves, we did not think it could happen to us. We never thought they would come to our tiny village in the remote countryside, far from any city.

One of my early memories is of the men of a Jewish labor camp from Budapest who came through our village. The Hungarian government would bring these slave laborers out of the camp to work on the railroads; when the work was completed, the laborers were taken back to the labor camp. While working on the railroad, they had nowhere to stay at night, so my father let them all sleep in our barn. Sometimes their wives would come to visit and stay in our house. In return, the women brought us lots of toys and, more importantly, lots of books from the city. We children spent hours lost in the worlds of those books. I could finish a book in a day. Because of them, I developed a love of reading at a young age.

As I understood only later from the books I read on World War II, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany as the head of the Nazi party in 1933. Hitler hated Jews as much as the Romanian Iron Guard did, and leaders of the antisemitic and racist parties became allies, joining together in their hatred and their designs to rule all of Europe. Then in September 1939, World War II began when German Nazi troops invaded Poland. The Hungarians, under the leadership of Miklós Horthy, also trusted Hitler and became allies. All this began to happen around us, but still far enough away from us that only Papa fretted about our safety.

But in the summer of 1940, when Miriam and I were six years old, things changed. Hitler gave the northern part of Transylvania to Hungary. At that time the population in Transylvania, the larger area surrounding our village, was half-Hungarian, half-Romanian, but everyone in our village was Romanian. Rumors spread that the Hungarian army would kill Jews and Romanians and set our village on fire. Even as a six-year-old child, I knew we were in danger.

Miriam, the quieter of the two of us, felt my anxiety, must have seen it on my face and in my body language. But she never complained; it was not her nature.

One day about 6:00 in the morning, we saw the Romanian army withdrawing from our area. Shortly, our town crier banged his drum and announced, “Hear ye! Hear ye! The notary asks all of the villagers to go to the top of the hill to welcome the Hungarian army.” It was strange. One army withdrew and another took its place. Not one shot was fired.

In a cloud of dust, Hungarian soldiers marched into our village, the commanding officer leading the troops in a long, shiny black car. The small parade was impressive, as it was intended to be. We villagers were to take note: The Hungarian army were now in power, so we were to welcome them! We heard the soldiers singing, “We are Horthy’s soldiers, the best-looking soldiers in the world.”

The commander demanded to speak with someone. Nobody spoke Hungarian except our family.

“I will speak with you,” said my father.

“We will stay in the village,” said the commander. “We need someplace to stay.” No one volunteered to let the soldiers stay with them.

Finally, my father said, “We have a large yard and house. You can stay with us.

That night, the soldiers camped in our yard; the commanding officer slept in our guest room—the only Jewish house in the village. I have a feeling that they knew we were Jewish, but nothing was said about it. There did not seem to be any problems because we were Jewish—at least that night.

Mama treated the officers like company: She baked her best chocolate torte and invited the officers to dine with our family. I remember that there was much conversation about good food, and Miriam and I were excited to sit at the table with these important men in uniform. It was a pleasant evening, and the officers praised Mama’s cooking and baking. Before they went to sleep, they kissed her hand as they thanked her, a courtly habit of many European and Hungarian men of the time. Early the next morning, they left, and our parents seemed to be reassured.

“See?” said Mama. “There is no truth to the talk that they are killing the Jews. They are real gentlemen.”

“Why would people tell such stories?” Papa asked, not expecting an answer, much less disagreement from my mother or anyone else in the family. “It seems you are right. Nazis will never come to a small village like ours,” he concluded. This we were to take as fact. Papa had said it.

Yet late at night, behind closed doors, our parents listened to a battery-operated radio. They discussed the news in Yiddish, a language they had purposefully not taught us so they could speak of things they didn’t want us to know. What was it they were hearing that would be so secret, something so bad they tried to hide it from us girls?

I pressed my ear against the door and eavesdropped, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Eva’s Epilogue
• Afterword
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Author’s Note
• Author Biographies
• Photo Credits
• Additional Resources
• Copyright