by Eva Mozes Kor and Liza Rojany Buccieri
Born in Portz, Romania, the third daughter of a land-rich Jewish farmer, and a twin, Eva Mozes and her sister Miriam lived a life of advantage. She and her family never wanted for food or clothing. Her dresses were custom made and the pantry was always full of fresh meat, vegetables, homemade cakes and pastries, and fruit from their orchard. The Mozes parents knew of the rumors of Hitler's tyranny and cruelty toward the Jews, but they assumed their farm was so remote that the Nazis would never bother to travel such a distance to seize them. At one point, Eva's father and uncle traveled to Palestine in hopes of finding a new life for his families, but when he came home to his wife with stories of all the possibilities the move would offer, she refused to leave her home. After several years of enduring the cruelty of taunting and verbal abuses by their neighbors and schoolmates, already twisted with anti-Semitism propaganda, the Mozes family was arrested in 1944 and sent to live in a ghetto. This short stay ended with a brutal, horrifying train trip to Auschwitz. After three days, crowded with over one hundred other Jews in a boxcar, no food, no water, and no place to lie down or relieve themselves, Eva and her family arrived at Auschwitz. Immediately upon stepping onto the platform, Eva and Mirium, dressed exactly alike in burgundy dresses, were spotted by a soldier.
"Are they twins?" he asked.
"Is that good?" Eva's mother said.
"Yes," said the guard.
"They are twins!" she answered.
That was the last time Eva and Miriam saw any of their family again, and the beginning of their terrifying experiences as "Mengele" twins.
Eva and Miriam, at 9 months
This book takes you through the year of imprisonment, starvation, illness and devastation Eva and Miriam lived through as they became the subjects of numerous agonizing, embarrassing, and excruciatingly painful experiments conducted by Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, also known as the "Angel of Death". After reading the book, I was disturbed by the piercing details and dire veracities portrayed within its pages. Every once in a while, you stumble across a book that melts onto you like a hot layer of realization over an oblivious form. This book, by Eva Mozes Kor, opens our eyes even wider to the autocracies of Hitler's Reich during WWII and the living hell that was Auschwitz.
The story is shocking to the extreme, but moving in the poignant moment, many years later, when Eva, her sister dead as a result of the experimentation, makes the resolution to forgive the Nazis for their sins against her and the Jewish people. She starts a Holocaust museum near her home of Terre Haute, Indiana, The Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Center, http://www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org/.
In 1993, she journeys to Germany to meet with Dr. Munch, a Nazi doctor who witnessed many gas chamber mass annihilations and signed the death certificates for tens of thousands of slaughtered Jews. After this eye-opening interview, Eva decided to write a letter of granting personal amnesty of all Nazis who where responsible for murdering her family and the millions of other Jews imprisoned in the concentration camps. Information about Dr. Munch can be found on The Jewish Virtual Library. at
Eva Mozes Kor triumphed over intense torture and exploitation. Her life is an inspiration for anyone who finds issue with perserverance. You can read more about survivors such as Eva at http://www.holocaustsurvivors.org/. Our existance within the buffered society we now find ourselves can only be viewed as representative of a world survivied by and builty upon the tragedies of WWII. The rebuilding of our country and communites after this war can be seen in an article from The Guardian, "Rebuilding the world after the second world war" (Sept. 10, 2009)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/11/second-world-war-rebuildingIf you are interested in finding more out about this book and others like it written for children and teens, you can visit The Children's War which is a Blogspot site for books written about children in WWII, http://thechildrenswar.blogspot.com/. This is a web-journal about historical fiction and non-fiction for children and teenagers set in and around World War II.
Kathleen, a few years ago I was fortunate to get a Holocaust survivor to come and speak to my 8th grade. She was also a survivor of Josef Mengele's horrific "experiments" although she was not a twin. She told her story in a stoic manner but her emotion was barely contained and my students understood that. Some of my girls wept, a few parents left the room and all were fully absorbed in her story. When asked if she had learned to forgive after all these years (Mengele's torture had left her sterile), she looked directly at us and replied with a firm, "Never." She is in her nineties now but the memory of what was done to her and her family is still strong.
ReplyDeleteThis novel was a good choice for review; thanks, I am always looking for Holocaust literature to add to my list.