Could You Forgive The Nazis If You Survived The Holocaust?

Tonight I watched a documentary on a Holocaust survivor called Forgiving Dr. Mengele. At the tender age of ten, Eva and her twin sister Miriam arrived at Auschwitz by train. Immediately the guards noticed the girls were special, and they were forcibly separated from the rest of their family who were taken to the gas chambers to die. Dr. Mengele, also known as the Angel of Death, performed inhumane genetic experiments on them and thousands of other twins.

"I was given five injections. That evening I developed extremely high fever. I was trembling. My arms and my legs were swollen, huge size. Mengele and Dr. Konig and three other doctors came in the next morning. They looked at my fever chart, and Dr. Mengele said, laughingly, 'Too bad, she is so young. She has only two weeks to live .."

The documentary centers on Eva's quest to find Dr. Menegele's records to save her dying sister, and her controversial complete forgiveness of all Germans.

Eva later told how a set of Gypsy twins was brought back from Mengele's lab after they were sewn back to back. Mengele had attempted to create a Siamese twin by connecting blood vessels and organs. The twins screamed day and night until gangrene set in, and after three days, they died ...

At the time of the experimentation, Miriam was injected with an unknown drug that shunted all growth of her kidneys. As a result, her health declined rapidly as she aged. In an attempt to save her sister, Eva donated one of her own kidneys. The doctors believed they could save Miriam, but only if they could learn exactly what substance Dr. Menegele had injected. Desperate to save her sister, Eva formed an organization for surviving twins to get the word out. Eventually she tracked down a former Nazi doctor, but he did not have any information on the whereabouts of the medical recorders. Miriam died and to this day, no records have ever been found.


As adults, Eva and Miriam suffered serious health problems. Eva suffered from miscarriages and tuberculosis. Her son had cancer. Miriam's kidneys never fully developed and she died in 1993 of a rare form of cancer, probably brought on by the unknown medical experiments and injections which she was subjected to at the hands of Josef Mengele.

-http://www.shoah.dk/doctors/mozes.htm

What I found to be most interesting about the documentary was Eva's decision to forgive and her determination to spread her story to as many people as possible.

All of the people featured in the documentary disagreed with her opinions. One woman argued that if she forgave, it would betray her parents. Others said they did not have the authority to forgive on behalf of the millions who had died.

Over the course of many years Eva stayed strong in her beliefs. She said forgiveness did not have anything to do with the perpetrator or with religion. Forgiveness was liberating herself from her pain.

Her definition of forgiveness was not shared by those who spoke in the documentary. I think it is interesting though.

What is forgiveness? Is it simply saying if I hate you I will only hurt myself so I won't hate you anymore?
Is it saying you deserve forgiveness because you have demonstrated repentance?
Is it saying I forgive you and will forget what has happened?

I understand what she is saying. She isn't saying forget the past. She isn't saying betray the dead. She isn't saying what happened was okay. She is saying I can't change the past and they can't change the past but in order to move forward, I have to let go of the anger. Getting even never helped anyone, she says.

The world needs more people like Eva. That is not to say evil should not be challenged but that we all need to learn to forgive even our worst enemies.