'If I met Mengele now, I'd forgive what he did to me' [View All]

[emad]

Her face peered out from an iconic image taken on the liberation of the Nazi death camp. Now, six decades on, one survivor tells David Smith her compassion extends even to the most infamous of her torturers

Sunday January 9, 2005
The Observer

Eva Mozes Kor learnt on her first night at Auschwitz what the smoke billowing from the chimneys meant: that most of her family had been killed.

Later she and her twin sister were subjected to biological experiments by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Yet 60 years after the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust, she has reached a conclusion: 'If I could meet Dr Mengele today, I would say to him: "I have forgiven you".'

A rare image published in The Observer today shows Eva as a girl at Auschwitz. It is from a film made by Soviet troops after they liberated the camp 60 years ago this month. Not surprisingly, Eva's forgiveness for the people who murdered her family is not shared by all the survivors of Auschwitz and other concentration and extermination camps who will mark the anniversary.

In Posen, Poland, in 1943, Heinrich Himmler told senior members of the SS: 'I want to speak to you frankly about a very grave matter. We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak about it in public... I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. Most of you will know what it means when a hundred bodies lie together, when five hundred lie there, or when there lie a thousand. And... to have seen this through... with just a few exceptions of human weakness... to have remained decent, that has made us tough. It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.'

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1386270,00.html