Romania-Born Survivor of Mengele’s Experiments Dies at 85

One of the last Romanian-born survivors of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele's infamous experiments on Holocaust camp victims has died in Poland.

Eva Mozes Kor died aged 85 in Krakow, where she was on an annual educational trip with the institute she founded in 1995 to "prevent prejudice and hatred" by sharing her experience in the Nazi camps.

Born in northwest Romania to Jewish farmer parents in 1934, she was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland in 1944 with her twin sister, Miriam, and her family. 

Like 1,500 other pairs of twins, the Mozes twins were subjected to the notorious experiments of the Nazi doctor - which may, ironically, have been the key to their survival.

The twins were liberated 18 months after their arrival to Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army. They had survived the Holocaust after Mengele selected them for his experiments on genetics. The rest of the family perished in the gas chambers.

The twins went back to now communist-ruled Romania after the war, but in 1950 they got permission to emigrate to Israel, where Eva joined the army and served as a sergeant major in the engineering corps. In 1960, she married an American fellow survivor, Michael Kor, and moved with him to the US.

In her new country, alongside her sister, Miriam, Mozes Kor opened a museum and educational centre, CANDLES, that stands for Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors.

Despite her frightful ordeal at the hands of Nazis who murdered her family - and whose experiments on her own body had lifelong effects on her health - she preached reconciliation and forgiveness.

In 2013, she met the grandson of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss who asked her to become his adoptive grandmother, which...

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