i am sassa

Imagine you are a ten year old child. Your entire family is taken against their will and shoved into a cattle car with no idea where you are going. Your mother is clinging tightly to you and your twin sister. The car stops after two days, and you and your family are marched onto a platform. People are packed together, screaming. You blink, and your father and two of your siblings are gone. You cling to your mother. A stranger in a uniform runs to her, asking if you and your sister are twins. Your mother asks if being twins is a good thing. When they tell her yes, she confirms. You and your sister are whisked away, and your frantic mother reaching for you is the last image you ever see of her. You and your sister spend almost an entire year being tortured like lab rats. Starved, neglected, measured, injected with countless unknown chemicals, surrounded by death. When you are finally freed, nothing is left of the home you once knew. Now imagine forgiving the men responsible. Imagine forgiving all of them, publicly. To me, it is unimaginable.

Eva Mozes Kor was in Auschwitz with her twin sister, Miriam, for ten months. She says of her experience, “I refused to die”. The man behind their torture was Dr. Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death”. He was a eugenicist, believing that undesirable tendencies and socially unacceptable behavior could be eradicated through selective breeding. He used twins to research the Nazi idea of the “perfect Aryan master race”. I think can understand why Eva often said she wanted her life on this earth to count for something. The cruelty she suffered as a child was so utterly pointless and tragic. To lose her family and be subjected to that kind of treatment for something as arbitrary as race would have to feel like a meaningless roll of the dice. It is just so difficult for me to wrap my head around.

Eva ended up marrying a man who was also a Holocaust survivor, and lived most of her life in the United States. She had two children and tried living a normal life, but her past haunted her. She became increasingly, explosively angry. She started speaking out about her story and seeking other survivors, and was subject to more harassment and racism along the way. Her home was repeatedly vandalized, her windows spray painted with swastikas. She found many survivors unwilling to speak of their experience, including her husband, and felt alienated and misunderstood. After the release of the Holocaust Docudrama in 1978, Eva began doing interviews and gaining traction in her search for other survivors. She talked to any news station who would listen to her about her experience, all while attending college, working as a real estate agent, and raising children. When a body was found and suspiciously identified as Mengele, Eva took out a second mortgage on her home and personally paid $18,000 to keep the case open. She started becoming known as a Nazi hunter.

Eva’s twin sister died in Israel at 59 from kidney complications, despite the fact that Eva had given her one of her own kidneys years prior. Miriam’s doctors had said that her kidneys stopped growing during the time she was in Auschwitz. Miriam became one more thing that the Nazis had taken from her, and she did something absolutely radical in response. She forgave them. She publicly forgave them, including Dr. Mengele specifically. She read letters of her forgiveness live on the news. She visited Auschwitz with a Nazi doctor. Pictures surfaced of her hugging ex-Nazis. Needless to say, Eva’s actions caused a serious outrage among some in the Jewish community. But Eva was clear that her forgiveness came solely from her, and was solely for her. She said it healed her. “Anger is the seed for war,” she said. “Forgiveness is the seed for peace”.

Eva kept on her path of forgiveness, traveling to lecture and continuing to re-visit Auschwitz yearly. She opened the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, and dedicated her life to helping others heal through forgiveness.

This painting was hard to do. I listened to the documentary Eva: A-7063 while I painted, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. I felt like my stomach was in knots, and I was crying half the time I painted. I am so glad I painted this woman. Despite the difficulty of it, I feel like the emotion I wanted to show came through. I wanted her eyes to look as endless as the darkness before her, like she could see a hope beyond her canvas that no one else could see. Like she’s looking at God. I’ll be thinking of her for a long time. I cannot imagine being subjected to what Eva went through, let alone making the decision to forgive those who took so much from her. I obviously have no way of knowing what I would do in her place. I do know, however, that I have an unparalleled respect for this enormously badass human being. I respect her for surviving against all odds, for continuing to scream her truth when no one was even listening, for her relentless hope. I respect her drive to love and heal others despite her own wounds, and her persistence in the path that she felt was right, regardless of what anyone else thought.

Thank you, Eva Mozes Kor.