DURING WORLD War II, Eva Kor, a 10-year-old Jewish girl, was marched off to Auschwitz with her family. She and her twin sister Miriam got separated from her parents and other siblings, and she never saw them again. They were gassed. Her first view upon entering the death camp was one of scattered corpses of children — stiff, hollowed out, naked, fly-infested.

The sight angered her. Why did you let yourselves die, she asked them. From then on, she decided on just one thing: to stay alive, anyhow. She may not have, of course. For like hundreds of twins who entered the camp, she and Miriam became the guinea pigs of Dr Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s Angel of Death, the notorious surgeon known for his extreme and vicious medical experiments on human beings, especially on twins. Deliberately, often casually, he was known to maul, mutilate and kill in a slow and appalling way, children, even babies, towards genetic and racial ends. Most died or were put to death, and the few who came out barely alive crashed in body or spirit. Eva was injected with some poisonous stuff and had just a few days to live; Miriam was injected with something that stunted the growth of her kidneys.
By the grace of god or stroke of luck, both Eva and Miriam survived. But forgive Mengele? What does forgiveness mean, especially of crimes of the most unthinkable kind? Why and how does one forgive, if at all, and under what circumstances? How much does forgiving have to do with the perpetrator and how much with the victim? Does a perpetrator have to “atone” or ask for forgiveness before being forgiven? And what in any case constitutes atonement?
These are the complex questions thrown up in the documentary film, Forgiving Dr Mengele, by award-winning American director Bob Hercules. Made in 2006, Mengele — shown at innumerable festivals in Europe and the United States — had its Asian premiere at the recent 11th Dhaka International Film Festival. Deeply affected crowds gathered around the director following the screening, Iranian directors among them. Everyone offered warm congratulations, shook his hand vigorously. “It’s such a difficult subject,” they cried, “you’ve been so brave to have tackled it.”
Forgiveness became — forgive the expression — the war cry of 75-year-old Eva Kor. After the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz, Kor went to Israel, married and moved to America where she works as a real estate agent, and set up the Candles Holocaust Museum and Education Centre in Indiana. She donated one of her kidneys to her sister and then made it her mission to find out what exactly had been injected into Miriam all those years ago. Her search led her to another SS physician, Hans Munch, who had found the practice of selecting prisoners for genetic and other experiments in the camp abhorrent, and had made a charade of participating. He was the only one of the Auschwitz staff to have been acquitted in a post-war trial. A nervous Eva, who travelled to Bavaria to meet him, found him to be a kindly old man, but who had little information on Mengele: “Mengele worked alone and amateurishly,” he says in the film. But Munch’s help proved invaluable when he agreed to accompany Eva to Auschwitz on the 50th anniversary of its liberation and sign a document confirming the existence of gas chambers and of Zyklon B. At this point, a friend at the festival declared the film should be shown to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad! And at this point in the film, a friend of Eva said to her: “You have forgiven Munch. How about Mengele?”
Eva forgave. “I,” she said, “had the power to forgive. Me, a little guinea pig, gave amnesty to all the Nazis.” But she could not forget.
Of the hundreds of films made on World War II and the Holocaust, Forgiving Dr Mengele is unique and compelling because it is about the act of forgiving the most sadistic of acts. But Eva’s conviction didn’t have any takers among other survivors who were interviewed, and most Israelis never wished to talk to her. So indelible were their scars that they wanted no “cheap grace”. Some sought justice; others felt it was neither their place nor their duty to forgive. If you forgive, they argued, it’s as if the crime had never happened. Others wondered whether forgiveness was possible if the perpetrator atoned for what he had done. And what, then, would constitute “atonement”? None of these arguments swayed Eva. Forgiving is a personal act, she contends, forgiving is healing, setting yourself free. A victim cannot remain a victim all his life. Forgiveness has little to do with the perpetrator or with religion. It’s the path to empowerment. Eva continues to get heaps of letters from people she has addressed in scores of meetings who have felt inspired by her words. On seeing this film, one woman was even brought back from the brink of suicide. This week Eva led a group to Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland for the 65th anniversary of the fall of the camps.
But wait! Eva, the super heroine sketched thus far, is also assailed by doubts and dilemmas. Towards the end of the film we are in for a surprise. On a visit to Israel, she meets a group of Palestinians to discuss the situation in the region. All of a sudden, she cannot listen to their tales. She has no answers.
And so? The question remains: does forgiveness come only after an event/tragedy has occurred? Does forgiving become easier once the crime has passed into history? Can you forgive when you are still fighting, when passions are still fired?
Merging footage with a real-time story (Eva, said the director, was lucky to have been videoed at several moments in her life), Hercules brings alive with great compassion and gentleness a complex unresolved human issue. To move from crime and punishment to crime and forgiveness is another calling for mankind altogether.

Latika Padgaonkar