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Remembrance of Things Past

Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, publicly forgave one of her former captors before he died last year—at the end, a convicted war criminal. On the seventy-fourth anniversary of the camp’s liberation, the long journey to bring one of its SS officers to justice raises questions about the power of forgiveness and the importance of historical memory.


Look at this picture: she is Eva Mozes Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, extending her hand to Oskar Gröning, a former SS officer in the camp. The setting: a district court in Lüneburg, Germany, where Gröning was accused of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 Hungarian Jews. Date: April 2015.

The picture is a conundrum: why would an Auschwitz survivor extend forgiveness to her former captor? Kor’s parents and two of her siblings had perished there. She and her twin sister Miriam had endured the deadly human experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death.”

During his trial, Gröning accepted “responsibility in front of God” for what he did at Auschwitz, but he rejected any criminal responsibility. Perhaps so as not to implicate himself further, he refused to show remorse or apologize.

For this and other reasons, none of Kor’s fifty-two co-plaintiffs in the case against the former SS officer followed her lead in publicly forgiving him. Many condemned her for the act.

When I chanced upon the photograph, though, I knew right away why Kor had forgiven Gröning. For I had heard her explain, years earlier, why.

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Jan Vihan is a contributing writer for In The Fray.

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