Eva Mozes was born in the small village of Portz, Romania, on Jan. 30, 1934. Her father went the next day to the near by village of Marca to register the birth of Eva and her identical twin, Miriam.
Life for the Mozes family was good. Eva's father Alexander owned much of the farm land surrounding the village and most of the people in the village farmed his land and worked for the Mozes family, indirectly. They were the only Jews in the village of Portz, but that did not seem to matter.
Even as a child, Eva remembers her father and mother listening to the radio in a bedroom and hearing the man whom she later knew as Hitler shouting his tirades against the Jews. During one period in the late 1930’s, Alexander Mozes encouraged his wife, Jaffa, to leave and immigrate to Israel but with four young children, she opposed the idea. The family stayed in Romania.
As identical twins, Eva and Miriam were the youngest in the family. Eva and Miriam were two of the four daughters born to the Mozes. Edit was four years old when the twins were born and Aliz was two years old.
In 1940, the Hungarian government took over the Transylvanian area of Romanian and Eva and Miriam as well as Edit and Aliz began to study Hungarian at the local school. Hungarian officials took over the government. While Mr. Mozes had to register and report regularly to assure authorities that they had not left the area, the girls were still able to continue at school.
Eva’s first encounter with prejudice came in the first grade when another student placed bird eggs on the teacher’s chair.
When the teacher sat down and realized what had been done, she became very angry and demanded to know who had placed the eggs on her chair. All the children in the class told her "The dirty Jews". Eva and Miriam were punished by having to kneel in the corner on corn kernels for an hour. That evening when they went home, they demanded their parents do something and they were told that "We are Jews. You will just have to learn to take it."
In March of 1944, the family was told by Hungarian gendarmes to gather some belongings because they were going to be relocated. They were taken to a ghetto in Simleul Silvanei and then later deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
On the selection platform at Auschwitz, the girls were identified as twins and taken to joint other twins who were to become part of the Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments. As twins, they were nature’s natural guinea pigs. One child was used as a control and the other had experiments conducted on her/him. If a twin died, the other twin was killed by an injection into the heart and comparative autopsies were done on the two. (See story on Mengele Twins elsewhere in this web page)
After the liberation of the camp, Eva and Miriam were the first two twins in the film taken by the Soviets and are often shown in footage about the Holocaust. They spent about 9 months in DP camps before finally arriving back home. A cousin who had survived the camps was there, farming the land. He told the girls that an aunt in Cluj, Romania, was looking for them. They were taken to Cluj where they lived with the aunt. In 1950 they received visas for Israel and went there. They became members of a kibbutz, populated mostly by orphans. In 1952, they both joined the Israeli Army. Eva studied drafting and Miriam became a nurse.
In 1960, Eva married an American tourist, Michael Kor, also a concentration camp survivor, and came to the United States, settling in Terre Haute, Indiana, where Mickey had already established himself as a pharmacist.
In 1985, Eva and Miriam returned to Auschwitz to re-unite the Mengele twins. Miriam died in 1993 of a rare form of cancer, brought on Eva believes, by the experiments.
In 1995, Eva founded the C.A.N.D.L.E. museum. The Museum is devoted to the Mengele twins who survived the horrible experiments of Dr. Mengele.
In the early hours of November 18th, 2003 the museum was firebombed in Terre Haute and completely destroyed. The story on the fire can be read
here.
