Eva Mozes Kor (1934–2019)

Eva Mozes Kor and her identical twin sister Miriam Mozes were born to a Jewish family in the tiny village of Porţ, Romania (later Hungary). Her parents, Alexander and Jaffa Mozes, had 4 daughters and enjoyed a comfortable living as landowners and farmers. When Eva and Miriam were six years old, at the start of World War II, their village was occupied by a Hungarian Nazi armed guard. In 1944, after four years of Nazi occupation, the family was transported to the ghetto in Şimleu Silvaniei. A few weeks later, they were put into a cattle car and transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Eva and Miriam were separated from the rest of their family and never saw them again. They became part of a group of children used as human subjects in genetic experiments under the direction of Josef Mengele. They survived this horror and were liberated by the Red Army in January 1945. They were sent to three different refugee camps over the next nine months before going to live with their aunt in Romania. The sisters emigrated to Israel in 1950. Eva joined a kibbutz and attended an agricultural school. She became a sergeant major in the Israeli Army Engineering Corps. She met Michael Kor, another Holocaust survivor and an American tourist, in Israel, and the couple were married in 1960 and went to live in the USA. In 1985, 40 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Eva Mozes Kor, Miriam Mozes, and other survivors conducted a mock trial of Josef Mengele that received international news coverage. She published her memoirs, Echoes from Auschwitz: Dr. Mengele's Twins: The Story of Eva and Miriam Mozes (1995) with Mary Wright, and Surviving the Angel of Death: The Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz (2009) with Lisa Rojany Buccieri. The Candles Holocaust Museum she founded in Terre Haute, Indiana, was destroyed in 2003 by arsonists believed to be white supremacists, but was rebuilt.