The birth of twins has always been considered a mystical fact - both the Bible and ancient myths are full of stories about them. People are fascinated by both the similarity, symmetry, almost duality, and the indissoluble, sometimes frightening connection of such brothers or sisters. Unfortunately, the phenomenon of twins turned out to be of interest not only to writers and artists, but also to Nazi “researchers,” sadistic vivisectors, the most terrible of whom was Auschwitz doctor Joseph Mengele, nicknamed the Angel of Death by prisoners. Mengele's interest in twins was purely practical. His goal was to increase the birth rate of the “Aryan race” so that every German woman could give birth to two or even three babies at a time. To achieve this, it was not “Aryan” twins who were sent “for experiments”, but Jewish and Gypsy children. Another goal of the doctor's inhumane experiments on the twins is to reveal how diseases change the human body from the inside. To do this, one of the twins was inoculated with a deadly virus, and after the child died, not only his body was opened, but also the corpse of his murdered twin.

However, the heroine of Affinity Konar’s novel “Mishling. Outlander,” 13-year-old Pearl Zamorski, explains the essence of the atrocities committed against her and her twin Stasya, in her own way, and her childish view turns out to be perhaps the most correct. “...I was imprisoned in a cage because I loved too much. I had an incredibly powerful union with Someone, and our jailer was burning with envy. Cold and empty, he was incapable of affection - neither filial, nor marital, nor paternal. He was driven only by vanity, and this windbag, like many others like him, decided to become famous. And then one day he came up with the simplest way to leave his mark on history - to find out what happens if you separate twins who love each other too much.”

Affinity Konar's book is full of elegant and deep symbolism; the author not only talks about the fate of his heroes against the backdrop of historical events, but also talks about human nature and nature in general. Dr. Mengele is confident that he is acting in accordance with the laws of nature - nature, they say, gave us “Aryan” examples of the beautiful and spiritual, and everything else must be destroyed. Well, during the destruction it is not a sin to mutilate the victims for the benefit of the “superior race”. Mengele turned people into animals - it is no coincidence that the zone where the experimental twins and prisoners with unusual appearance, for example, midgets or albinos, were located, was nicknamed the Menagerie in the camp and was located in the former stables. “The figures flew, crawled, and sneaked towards the ark. Not a single living creature was driven away for its smallness. A leech was looking for something to attach itself to, a centipede was striding sedately, a cricket was singing. The inhabitants of swamps, mountains and deserts dived, spun, and looked for food. And I recognized them, pair by pair, and took comfort in my knowledge. But the procession continued, the flames grew weaker, and the shadows succumbed to illness. Humps grew on their backs, limbs fell off, and ridges dissolved. Losing their appearance, living creatures became monsters. And they didn’t recognize themselves. And yet, while the flame burned, the shadows did not die. And that’s something, right?”

The violent distortion of nature, which Dr. Mengele is engaged in, is opposed to the natural laws of evolution. Members of the Zamorski family remember prayer in difficult, turning points, but they are secular Jews and believe in the laws of Darwin, and even more so of Lamarck. Stasi and Pearl's father is a doctor, and their beloved grandfather is a biology professor. He came up with a game that helps girls survive. Initially, the game was needed to console girls who, because of their blond hair, were mistaken for people of mixed national origin, “outsiders,” and therefore, according to the Nazis, completely contrary to the nature of “hybrids.”

“Over time, each of us was increasingly thrown in the face of this word: “mischling”; That’s why you came up with a game of “wildlife” for us. Don't think about these stupid Nuremberg laws, he insisted. Do not listen to idle talk about the purity of the race, genetic crossing, quarter-Jews and other non-Aryans, about ridiculous, disgusting tests that are aimed at dividing our society on the principle of a drop of blood, depending on who you are married to and where you pray to G-d . When you hear such words, Zaide said, remember the diversity of living nature. Revere her and be strong.”

When playing “wild nature”, girls imagine themselves as creatures from different levels of the evolutionary ladder - from amoeba to higher mammals. This game is an inclusion in the natural picture of the world, untouched by Dr. Mengele’s scalpel. Children metaphorically change and yet remain themselves. In the second part of the novel, Stasya and her friend Felix, having obtained fur coats and managed to escape from the camp, are transformed into the Jackal and the Bear, as in an ancient myth, where animals and people are not divided into pure and unclean.

Dr. Mengele's "menagerie" is contrasted with a zoo - a place where nature and education go hand in hand, and people take care of preserving rare species without encroaching on the distortion of nature. “In the zoos that grandfather read to us about, they care about the conservation of species and show a huge diversity of wildlife. But here they are only concerned about compiling a sinister collection.” It is no coincidence that after the war, the surviving members of the Zamorski family meet at the Warsaw Zoo.

Affinity Konar's novel is not only characterized by symbolism associated with nature. Allegorically, she writes about “survivor syndrome” - a feeling of guilt that plagued concentration camp survivors. Completely unreasonably, these people, in fact heroes, believed that they survived only at the expense of their dead loved ones. Doctor Mengele deceives Stasya and gives her a special injection of immortality. At first the naive girl is happy, then sad that she will outlive her friends and maybe even her sister, then she imagines that she is becoming immortal because the life of those who leave her is poured into her veins and breath. “...others paid with their lives for my eternal life. My blood has thickened from the deaths of others; unspoken words, unknown loves, uncomposed poems dissolved in her. She absorbed the colors of unpainted paintings and unfulfilled children's laughter. It was so difficult to exist with this blood in my veins that sometimes I began to think: maybe it’s for the best that Pearl is not in danger of immortality. Having fully felt my choice, I would not wish such a fate on my sister: to while away her life alone, half without a partner, under the eternal burden of a future taken from others.”

Pearl and Stasya Zamorski are alike in everything. They read each other's thoughts and see common dreams. Sometimes they sit back to back and draw, and then it turns out that their drawings are exactly the same. And yet, having matured a little, they choose different ways for themselves to overcome the trauma. Stasya's path is clear - this is the path of revenge, she vows to track down and kill Dr. Mengele. But Pearl chooses the path of forgiveness, and at first this decision causes anger and rejection of the reader. How can this be forgiven?!

But Pearl’s choice is based on a real human mystery, and Affinity Konar, using the example of the heroine’s choice, suggests one of the possible solutions. "Mishling. Outlander" is a novel written based on documents and research materials. Many of his heroes have prototypes. The prototypes of the Zamorski sisters were Eva and Miriam Moses. Eva Moses, a ten-year-old girl from Transylvania, was injected with a deadly virus in Auschwitz. It was assumed that when the girl died, her twin Miriam would also be killed and dissected, but Eva miraculously survived, and thereby saved her sister. After Miriam's death in 1993, Eva began a process to collect testimonies from former Auschwitz doctors, at the end of which she announced that she forgives them, including Dr. Mengele. The very power to forgive, according to Eva Moses-Kor, made her stronger than her tormentors, and only forgiveness helped her renounce painful memories and cross them out.

And even such an explanation leaves Eva Moses-Kor’s decision mysterious, incomprehensible to us, who did not experience her suffering, but are not ready to forgive them. She herself is the author of the novel “Mishling. Outlander” implicitly but constantly emphasizes that the right of such forgiveness belongs to the victims, whose suffering it can reduce, but not to the rest of humanity, not to civilization as such.

The forgiveness that Pearl bestows on her tormentors does not erase the girl’s suffering and losses, but it does erase the actions of the executioners. She remained alive, she is capable of experiencing happiness, which means that everything that was done to her had no meaning. The girl’s cruel and victorious forgiveness abolishes the very existence of Dr. Mengele and his henchmen, making their lives absolutely meaningless.

“Forgiveness did not bring back my family, did not quench the pain, did not dull the nightmares, did not mark anything new, but did not put an end to the old. Forgiveness allowed me to repeat and acknowledge the fact that I was still living, to prove that their experiments, tricks, tests - everything was in vain, because they didn’t destroy me, which means they underestimated my childhood endurance. Thanks to forgiveness, it became clear that they had not succeeded in erasing me from the face of the earth.”

Affinity Konar. Mishling. Outlander. Translation from English by Elena Petrova. M., Azbuka, 2017.

Date and place of birth: 01/30/1934, Porz village, Romania

Nationality: Jewish

A country: Romania/Hungary

Profession (before and/or after release): schoolgirl/realtor

Date of arrival at camp: 1944

Date of release (movement to another camp): 01/27/1945

Date and place of death (current place of residence)): Indiana, USA

Information about those who provided information (full name, family relationships, or profession):

Where do relatives live: USA and Israel

Sources of information (archives, websites, publications):

• Wikipedia website:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_Mozes_Kor
  https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D1%80,_%D0%95%D0%B2%D0%B0_%D0%9C%D0%BE%D0%B7 %D0%B5%D1%81
• “Like-A” website: http://www.like-a.ru/?p=21366

Additional information:

1940 - occupation of the village of Porz (Romania) by the Hungarian Nazi armed guards

1944 - sent to the Cehei ghetto (Simluel-Sylvania ghetto), then, a few weeks later, to Auschwitz. There, their parents and older sisters were killed, and the twins Eva and Miriam were immediately given to Josef Mengele. Eve Moses was subjected to an experiment by Dr. Mengele, who injected her with a deadly injection. She was supposed to die within two weeks, but she survived.

On January 27, 1945, she was released together with her sister from the concentration camp. In the surviving historical footage of the Soviet newsreel of the liberation of Auschwitz, Eva walks with Miriam, holding hands, first after a nurse in a white coat.

After liberation, Eva and her sister were sent to a monastery in Katowice, which was used as a shelter for orphans. They stayed there for nine months and found a friend in Rosalita Tssengeri, who was a friend of their mother and who also had twin daughters. It was Tssengeri who helped them return to their homeland after liberation.

After returning to Romania, they arrived in their home village, their house was destroyed, and their cousin took them from there. Now the sisters lived in Cluj with their aunt Irina, also a war survivor, and went to school.

In 1950, at the age of 16, Eva and Miriam Moses received permission to leave Romania and emigrate to Israel. The Moses sisters moved to Israel, arriving at the port of Haifa. They became members of a kibbutz populated mostly by orphans, Eva attended agricultural school and received the rank of sergeant in the Israeli Army Corps of Engineers. Eva Moses studied drafting.

In 1960, Eva married American Michael Kors, also a Holocaust survivor, and moved to Terre Haute, Indiana, USA, becoming a US citizen in 1965. She worked as a realtor.

In 1978, after NBC aired the miniseries The Holocaust, Eva and Miriam, who was still living in Israel, began finding other child survivors in medical experiments.

In 1984, Eva Moses Core founded the CANDLES Museum, which stands for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors. She was an activist, giving lectures and leading tours, and returning to Auschwitz many times, accompanied by friends and community members.

Mengele's experiments did not go unnoticed: Eva suffered from miscarriages and tuberculosis, her son had cancer, and Miriam had kidney problems. After Miriam’s third pregnancy, her kidneys failed, and Eva donated one kidney to her: “I had two kidneys and one sister, it was an easy choice,” but it didn’t help: Miriam Moses died on June 6, 1993. Still not successful find out what substances were administered to them at Auschwitz.

In August 1993, after the death of her sister, Eva went to Germany, to the house of Hans Munch, since he could not fly to Boston. There, Eva Moses Kor invited Münch to go with her to Auschwitz in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, and he agreed. In the presence of newsreels around the world, Munch signed a statement confirming the existence of gas chambers, for which Eva Moses Kor is grateful to him.

Ten months later, she thought about her letter of forgiveness for all the people responsible for the Holocaust. Moses wrote it for four months, and initially it was addressed to Dr. Muench, but Eva’s proofreader told her that Dr. Mengele was still in charge - but she forgave him too, she says about this: “I felt free from Auschwitz, from Mengele ", "Nothing can be changed," but for her this letter is "restorative, liberating, empowering." Eva Moses explains that this is only her position, she does not speak on behalf of all survivors.

In 2006, a documentary film “Forgive Dr. Mengele” was made about her.

In 2007, Eva worked with Indiana legislators to pass legislation requiring Holocaust education in high schools.

She has appeared in the CNN documentaries Voices of Auschwitz (2015) and The Incredible Survivors (2016).

In April 2015, she went to testify in the trial of former Nazi Oskar Gröning. During the trial, Kor and Gröning hugged and even kissed, and the former prisoner even thanked him that, at the age of 93, he was ready to testify for what happened 70 years ago. Out of surprise, Oskar Gröning fainted.

In May 2015, she received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, the same month Moses Core was named Grand Marshal of the Indianapolis 500 Festival Parade.

She also received the 2015 Wabash Valley Women of Influence Award, sponsored by the United Way of the Wabash Valley. That same year, she was presented with the Anne Frank Change the World Award from the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights in Boise, Idaho and the Mike Vogel Humanitarian Award in Indianapolis.

01/23/2016 – Eva became the main character of the new documentary “The Girl Who Forgives the Nazis” on Channel4 (UK), which tells about the meeting between Kor and Groening.

That same year, she traveled to Los Angeles to become one of 13 Holocaust survivors memorialized using cutting-edge technology at the University of Southern California. The project is a collaboration between the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, the USC Shoah Foundation, and Conscience Display.

Eva Moses Core has been recognized by four Indiana governors: twice with the Sagamore of the Wabash Award, once with the Indiana's Distinguished Hoosier Award, and in 2017, she was given the state's highest honor, the Sachem Award.

Currently, Ted Green Films and WFYI Indianapolis are planning to make a film about Eve Moses Core, which will be released in the spring of 2018.

Family:

Father: Alexander Moses

Mother – Jaffa

Older sisters Edith and Aliz

Twin sister Miriam

Husband: Michael Core

children – Alex and Rina

Heavy fighting in the Auschwitz area continued for nine days. Then an extraordinary silence reigned in that part of it where 10-year-old Eva Moses Core and her twin sister Miriam sat hidden. In the afternoon this relative calm was broken.

“A woman broke into our barracks. "We are free! We are free! We are free!" - she screamed at the top of her voice. It was wonderful! It sounded great,” says Kor.

However, another half hour passed before Kor began to understand the full meaning of what was happening on January 27, 1945. From afar, through the snow, “many people dressed in white camouflage suits” were approaching.

“Their faces broke into smiles,” says Kor. “And, most importantly for me, they didn’t look like Nazis.” We ran out to meet them. They hugged us and gave us chocolates and cookies. This is how I remember my first taste of freedom.”

Kor, now 80, and her sister were among about 7,000 prisoners liberated by the Soviet army from the notorious Nazi death camp. The 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz is celebrated next week.

Kor is one of the few children of Auschwitz who survived horrific medical experiments under the direction of one of the Nazis' most inhumane criminals, Josef Mengele, who earned himself the nickname the Angel of Death.

That evening, Kor recalls, soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front came to the barracks where he and his sister lived. “They drank some vodka and began to dance Russian dances, and we stood around them and applauded,” Kor told an RFE/RL correspondent.

A few days later they returned. They brought large movie cameras with them and came to us with an unusual request. They asked the children to put on their striped camp clothes again and walk around the camp in them.

These images became the only existing images of the sisters during their time in Auschwitz. They walk in a group of other children. A woman walks next to them with a baby in her arms, dressed in prison clothes.

Not everyone agreed to wear striped clothes again. According to Kor, her and her sister’s decision was influenced by the January weather: “I told my sister: “It’s cold outside, an extra layer of clothes won’t hurt.” That's what we did, and then they filmed us walking between two rows of barbed wire fences."

MAY 1944

Eva and Miriam arrived at Auschwitz in May 1944 with their parents and two older sisters. They were brought from the Romanian ghetto Simleul-Sylvania located in Transylvania. Along with thousands of other Jews, they traveled for four days in overcrowded cattle cars.

The last time the twins saw their relatives was on the so-called “separation platform” of Auschwitz. The father and sisters disappeared into the crowd; the mother continued to hold the girls' hands tightly.

A man in a German uniform asked their mother if her girls were twins. She asked if it would be good for them, and the German said yes. The mother confirmed that Eva and Miriam were indeed twins, after which they were pulled out of her arms.

“All I really remember is my mother reaching out to us in desperation and being pulled away from us,” Kor says. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye to her.” But I didn’t understand then that I was seeing her for the last time.”

The twins never managed to find out the fate of their parents and sisters.

"I refused to die"

There were about one and a half thousand such pairs of twins in Auschwitz. Like other twins, the sisters were subjected to torturous examinations, injections and genetic experiments. They were treated like guinea pigs. Kor recalls how she was separated from her sister and was injected with an unknown substance, after which her temperature jumped.

Years later, Miriam told her that during this time the doctors at Auschwitz were watching her closely, as if expecting something. Core concluded that if she had died from this injection, the doctors would have killed Miriam to perform a comparative autopsy.

She recalls Mengele’s words when she began to have a fever: “Ginning sarcastically, he said: “What a pity, so young. She only has two weeks to live." I knew he was right. But I refused to die. I made a silent vow to myself to refute Dr. Mengele. I will survive and be reunited with my sister Miriam."

"My Lost Childhood"

Kor miraculously managed to escape when, a week before the arrival of Soviet soldiers, four Nazis suddenly fired at the prisoners with machine gun fire. After their release, the sisters were initially placed under the care of local nuns, who “filled the girls with toys.”

“Oddly enough, I found it offensive. They didn’t understand that I was no longer a child, I no longer played with toys,” says Kor. “I have no doubt that they tried to do the best, but they did not understand what we experienced in our 11 years. I never played with toys again. In Auschwitz my childhood was lost forever.”

The girls lived in a refugee camp for some time, and then they managed to return home to the Romanian village of Port. The girls' family owned land here and farmed until Hungarian troops - allies of the Nazis - forced them into a ghetto in 1944.

Their house stood empty and looted. “Perhaps it was the saddest day of my life. Because I was so desperately hoping that someone was still alive,” says Kor.

"Free from Auschwitz"

In 1950, the sisters immigrated to Israel. There, for the first time in nine years—since the occupation of their village by Hungarian troops—she was able to sleep peacefully again: “I finally slept without fear of being killed for being Jewish.”

The sisters worked, got married, had children. In the 1960s, Kor moved to the United States with her American husband, also a Holocaust survivor.

Until her death in 1993, Miriam suffered from kidney diseases, caused, according to Kor, by Mengele's experiments. But to this day, she has never been able to find out exactly what substances were administered to her and her sister in Auschwitz.

After the death of her sister, Kor began a process that she herself characterizes as a different path of liberation - the process of forgiveness to her tormentors.

In 1995, when the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz was celebrated, Kor read a witness statement signed by Nazi doctor Hans Münch, whom she asked to confirm the details of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz.

“It was important to me that this was not a Jewish Holocaust survivor or liberator, but a Nazi doctor,” says Kor. – Because revisionists always claim that the whole story was invented by the Jews. If I meet one of them, I can shove this document in his face."

After reading this testimony, Kor declared that she forgives the Nazis. Given the scale of the crimes committed during the Holocaust, Kor's statement was controversial.

“What I discovered was a turning point in my life,” says Kor. “I discovered that I have the power to forgive.” No one can give me this power, no one can take it away. She belongs entirely to me, and I can use her as I please."

Kor managed to forgive even Mengele. The SS doctor died in 1979 in South America. For decades, he managed to evade arrest and prosecution.

“And if I forgive Mengele, the worst of them, then I can forgive everyone who has ever hurt me,” says Kor.

Forgiveness, Kor said, freed her from her “tragic past: “I was free from Auschwitz, and I was free from Mengele.”

Victims of Dr. Mengele... Among them there are people who are ready to forgive the sadistic doctor. And this is not Stockholm syndrome. And what?

Anat MIDAN

“If someone had told me in my youth that in decades I would forgive Dr. Mengele, I would have advised him to see a psychiatrist. But over the years I have changed. This forgiveness helped me start living again.” Eva Moses-Kor gave such an unusual speech to the participants of a conference on criminology at Bar-Ilan University. Only Yona Lax, who was sitting in the front row, did not remain silent. Taking the podium, she said: “None of those who died gave you the right to forgive anyone.”

Both women went through Auschwitz, lost their families, and were patients of Dr. Mengele, who conducted sadistic experiments on Jews. Israeli Lax is 86 years old. 82-year-old Moses-Kor specially arrived from the United States to participate in the conference.

“There are many Holocaust survivors in Israel - and they do not forgive the Nazis,” the Israeli woman sternly told the American. "But why?! - exclaims Moses-Kor. “I also cried for years, but I’m tired of it.”

Live another day

They were brought to Auschwitz at about the same time, they lived in different barracks, but then they were united in barracks number 10. There Mengele, nicknamed Doctor Death, began his experiments, and then transferred the “patients” to the camp hospital.

Eva was born in Romanian Transylvania and was sent to Auschwitz with her family at the age of 10. “The Nazis saw that my sister and I were twins and immediately drove us aside. I never saw my parents or my two older sisters again. I still remember how they drove us into a barracks, cut our hair, undressed us, and how we were tattooed with numbers on our left arms. For me - A7063, Miriam - B7064. We were ten pairs of twins from 3 to 16 years old, hungry and powerless. Every day they dragged us to experiments, measured us naked, injected us with something, took blood tests. One day I developed a fever and was taken to the hospital. They were sure that I would not survive. But I survived and was returned to the block in Birkenau, where I saw Miriam again. On January 27, 1945, four days before my 14th birthday, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz and the torture ended. The soldiers gave us chocolate and brought us beds and mattresses. By that time I had already forgotten how to sleep on a mattress.”

Eva and Miriam, 1940

Joseph Mengele

In the 1980s, Moses-Kor organized a search for other Mengele twins and found 122 survivors. In 1984, she created an organization with the goal of helping patients of a Nazi doctor. “We went through terrible things, even to the point of having paint injected into our eyes. Miriam suffered from kidney disease. I gave her my kidney in 1987 and she lived until 1993.”

Yona Lax also had a twin sister, also Miriam. They ended up in Auschwitz in 1944, after the liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, where their parents were killed. As a result of the selection, Miriam was sent to the gas chamber, while Yona was given to Mengele. She cried and asked the officer standing next to her not to separate her from her sister. It turned out that it was Mengele himself. “When he heard that we were twins and that my sister was sent to the gas chamber, he sent a soldier to bring her back. This is how Doctor Death saved Miriam.”

Yona and Miriam, 1941

Nightmares

After the war, the Lax sisters came to Israel and got married. Yona heads the Mengele Twins society: “Mengele is the personification of Auschwitz. The camp was run by sadists, and I won’t call them anything else.” “And I decided to forget everything,” Moses-Kor objects. - I suffered for 71 years, but one day I asked myself if I was ready to torment myself with memories of the few years that remained for me. And I decided no. I forgave my tormentors, created a Holocaust museum in my city and give lectures there. From time to time I take groups to Auschwitz. After the creation of the museum, nightmares stopped tormenting me.”

Despite the common tragic past, Lax addresses his interlocutor not by name, but by “Mrs. Kor.” “By forgiving, you are doing what the Nazis wanted: erasing the memory of the Jews,” she tells the American dryly.

Moses-Kor loses his cool: “I don’t need your Jewish history lessons. Israel is important to me; I served in the army for several years. What does this have to do with it?

“I think peace can be achieved in other ways, like taking pills or going to a psychologist, rather than forgiving the Nazis,” argues Jonah Lax.

Despite ideological differences, the women talked to each other about families, about life after the war, and told how they worked hard, but were still able to get an education. Moses-Kor entered university only after she had raised her children, and studied there with her daughter: “The children asked why they didn’t have grandparents, and I explained that they were killed by the Nazis. As a result, an elderly American couple volunteered to become grandparents to my children. We live in a small town, there are few Jews there, so we insisted that our son and daughter study Judaism. On Saturdays I took them to the synagogue. It was harder for me than for you, Yona.”

Israel did not forgive

Moses-Kor said that the “Mengele twins” do not want to meet with her. “I think they are jealous. They would like me to suffer like Yona, to experience everything that the other “Mengele twins” constantly experience. They may continue to suffer, but their suffering does not benefit anyone.”

“You can say whatever you want in the US, and you probably have non-Jewish listeners there, but here in Israel there is no room for forgiveness,” Lax says. And the women part without saying goodbye...

Excerpt from an article in the newspaper “News of Israel”