Oskar Groning trial: Auschwitz survivor recounts being subjected to brutal experiments at the hands of infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele
Eva Kor reveals how she and her twin sister were both injected with unknown substances as she gives testimony at trial of guard charged with complicity in Holocaust
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Your support makes all the difference.Eva Kor still bears the blue Auschwitz prisoner number A-7063 on her forearm. But as she sat opposite an impassive 93-year-old former guard at the death camp who is charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 Jews, she recalled how as a child prisoner she endured the hideous medical experiments of the infamous Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.
The trial of Oskar Gröning continued in Lüneburg with testimony from the 81-year-old Ms Kor. She told the former SS guard: “Tell today’s young neo-Nazis that Auschwitz existed and Nazi ideology produces no winners only losers.”
In harrowing detail, the petite Ms Kor told a court how she and her twin sister Miriam escaped being gassed at the death camp because of Mengele’s obsession with experimenting on twins. She recalled how she arrived at Auschwitz with her family after a 70-hour journey from Romania in a rail cattle wagon without food or water. “All I really remember is seeing my mother’s arms stretched out in despair as she was pulled away. I never got to say goodbye to her,” she told a hushed courtroom. “Everywhere there was shouting in German, dogs were barking. It was the gates of hell.”
Ten-year-old Eva also immediately lost her father and two older sisters. Because she was a twin, she was taken with her sister to the children’s block where she remembered seeing the floor strewn with the corpses of dead children who were the victims of Mengele’s experiments. “I was determined that Miriam and I should not end up like that,” she said.
She and her sister were both subjected to brutal experiments in which they were injected with unknown substances which made their limbs swell uncontrollably. Her sister nearly died from kidney failure. “I learnt that if I died they would have killed Miriam to conduct a comparative autopsy,” she said.
Ms Kor is one of the 48 co-plaintiffs at the trial of Mr Gröning, a former Auschwitz guard who has been charged with complicity in the murder of 300,000 prisoners at the death camp over 48 days in 1944. Now frail, white-haired and scarcely able to walk, Mr Gröning sat slumped impassively in his seat.
The presiding judge, Franz Kompisch, interrupted proceedings to prevent Ms Kor from asking Mr Gröning a series of questions about Auschwitz. “I want you to make a clear statement,” she told the former guard. The judge insisted that court rules permitted her only to make a statement.
Mr Gröning, who is nicknamed the “bookkeeper of Auschwitz”, has insisted that he personally harmed no one at the death camp where he was employed sorting out the belongings and money stripped from prisoners before they were dispatched to the gas chambers.
However he has admitted watching a fellow SS man kill the baby of a prisoner with his bare hands and confessed to seeing inmates gassed. Earlier this week he admitted that he was “morally complicit” in the murder of millions and asked for forgiveness from the Jewish people.