“forgiveness is the best revenge” Eva Moses Kor

Recent photo of Eva Moses Kor, a famous Holocaust survivor

The title of my blog post today comes from a news article which you can read in full at http://democratherald.com/corvallis/news/local/the-power-of-forgiveness/article_108391ff-fcab-51f1-946a-d38f3c55bf11.html

The following quote is from the news article, cited above:

Begin quote

In 1984 [Eva Moses] Kor founded an organization called CANDLES, or Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors, and ultimately located 122 other surviving [Dr. Josef] Mengele Twins.

But her biggest personal breakthrough didn’t come until a decade later, after she met a Nazi doctor named [Dr.] Hans Munch who had worked at Auschwitz, where his job was to monitor the gas chambers and record the number of the dead.

At her request, he told her in detail about how the gas chambers operated. He also treated her with kindness and respect, and he confessed his personal torment at the memory of what he had done in the death camps.

“This is my problem,” he told her. “This is my nightmare that I live with every day of my life.”

Grateful for his openness, she struggled for the appropriate way to thank him. The solution she came up with shocked the world.

In 1995, during a ceremony at Auschwitz to mark the 50th anniversary of the camp’s liberation, she read a letter in which she forgave the Nazis for the crimes they had perpetrated against herself and her family. Some people were outraged by the letter, but for Kor it was transformative and liberating in the truest sense of the word.

End quote

Why would Dr. Hans Munch confess something like that? Can you say “mentally ill”?