I Survived Josef Mengele’s Eye-Swap Experiment – World War II

Three a.m., the wooden barracks in Auschwitz are freezing. I wake up with such a high fever that I can barely open my eyes. My body is burning, my legs are swollen, and Miriam is beside me, frightened.

It has been two days since the German doctor Joseph Mengele injected something into my right arm. I do not know what it was, and nobody knows. The next morning, he appears in the infirmary, looks at my chart, laughs, and says, what a pity she is so young and only has two weeks to live.

I understand German and I hear everything. Later, I hear the guards talking amongst themselves about how the twin will go with her when this one dies, because of lethal injection protocol since Mengele needs both for the autopsy.

I look at Miriam because she is ten years old and I am ten years old. And I think that if I die, you die too, but I am not going to die. May 1944 arrives and the Mozes family is uprooted from their village, forcibly shoved into cattle cars with Jews from all over the region crammed against each other.

They are squeezed into a space where they can barely breathe, without water, without air, and without dignity. The train continues westward, advancing for hours and days that seem endless while no one knows where they are being taken.

When the doors finally open, what appears before them is not an ordinary station, but Auschwitz Birkenau. The cold air rushes in like a slap in the face and the strange, heavy smell is the first thing Eva notices at ten years old.

The chaos is immediate and almost deafening with people shouting and trying to find relatives while dogs bark fiercely, led by soldiers in impeccable uniforms. Guards shout orders in German, and each command sounds like a sentence while families are torn apart in seconds to live or to die.

Everything is decided with a single glance from whoever holds the power. Eva turns around for a moment, trying to understand where she is and searching for a face to recognize in that sea of desperate people.

But when she looks again, her father and her two older sisters have disappeared, simply vanished and ripped from her sight in the blink of an eye. She would never see them again.

Eva and Miriam cling to their mother as the three women weep, unable to comprehend what is happening and lost in the midst of the crowd that moves like an uncontrolled river. And then a man appears, running across the platform and moving through the crowd as if searching for something specific.

He shouts a single word repeatedly, calling for twins in German. He stops in front of them and his eyes fix on the girls as if he had found exactly what he was looking for, asking if they are twins.

The mother hesitates, senses the danger, and senses that the question carries something dark, but does not understand its nature. She asks almost in a whisper if that is good, and the guard replies yes.

At that moment, almost as if a gear had been activated, another soldier appears without explanation, and without looking back he pulls the mother to the right while the girls are dragged to the left. They cry and the mother cries while Eva sees her arms stretch out in the air in pure despair as she is carried away.

That image will be etched in your memory forever. Thirty minutes, that was the time it took for Eva to lose her entire family and the entire structure she knew as life.

Only she and Miriam remained, holding hands and weeping in the midst of a hell they were barely beginning to understand. They had been selected, but not to live, to serve as guinea pigs in the laboratory of death.

The man who cried out for twins had a name, Joseph Mengele, a doctor, SS officer, and one of the greatest criminals in human history. Mengele was obsessed with twins, an almost ritualistic fixation that guided his steps and shaped every decision he made on the field.

He believed that by studying them he could unlock the secrets of genetics and from that, create what he considered to be a superior race. For this, he needed human material, living matter that he could manipulate, compare, and destroy, and in Auschwitz he had unlimited access to this resource.

According to records preserved in the Auschwitz museum archives, Mengele conducted experiments on approximately fifteen hundred pairs of twins, and fewer than two hundred survived. A number that, in itself, sums up the scale of horror.

Eva and Miriam became known as the Mengele twins, a title they would only understand much later, when the weight of those words was already etched into their lives. Every morning, without exception, Mengele would do the count to know how many guinea pigs he still had.

He wanted to know how many were alive and ready to be measured, examined, or injured again. The children were forced to stand completely naked, vulnerable under the cold light, while he slowly walked by, observing, taking notes, and evaluating as if inspecting objects, not human beings.

Eva was subjected to two main types of experiments. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, she and Miriam were taken along with other twins to a room where they remained naked for hours.

For up to eight hours at a time, doctors measured every part of their bodies, including height, skulls, circumferences, and angles, comparing one sister to the other and looking for symmetries or differences. Everything was meticulously recorded in endless tables, filled with numbers that completely ignored the human suffering behind them.

On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays came the other part of the routine, the blood lab. They tied Eva’s arms tightly, tightening them until her blood flow was restricted.

They would draw large amounts of blood from her left arm until she was weak and dizzy, and then inject unknown substances into her right arm. At least five injections per session, a cycle repeated so many times that it became part of the predictable terror of the days.

What was in those syringes, Eva didn’t know then and never would. After one of the injections, Eva became ill with a very high fever, and swollen and painful arms and legs.

She shivered under the scorching August sun, while red spots covered her skin. On the next visit to the lab, they didn’t tie her arms, they just took her temperature and took her to the hospital immediately.

But hospital was just a name because the place was a shack crammed with people who looked more dead than alive. The following morning, Mengele entered accompanied by four doctors, and he didn’t examine her, he just looked at the temperature chart and declared coldly.

What a shame, she’s so young and will die in just two weeks. Two weeks. Eva was ten years old and had just received her death sentence.

What happened during those two weeks is difficult to put into words, and Eva has only one clear memory of crawling across the floor of the shack. She could no longer walk, so she dragged herself toward a water tap on the other side of the space, fainting and regaining consciousness repeatedly.

And as she crawled, she repeated to herself like a mantra that she needed to survive. Two weeks later, the fever went down and Eva immediately felt stronger, though it took another three weeks for her temperature to return to normal.

When she finally returned to the twins shack, Miriam was sitting on the bed, staring into space. Eva asked what happened, and Miriam replied that she could not talk about it and was not going to talk about it.

And they did not speak, because for forty years Eva and Miriam did not talk about Auschwitz. Four decades after her liberation, Eva finally gathers the courage to ask a question she has carried in silence since childhood.

She asks Miriam if she remembers when they took her to the hospital, and the answer comes softly, almost a whisper, confirming that she remembered. Eva insists carefully, like someone poking at an old wound, asking what happened to her while she was there.

Miriam takes a deep breath before answering that she was under N4zi medical supervision twenty-four hours a day. It was exactly the period, those two whole weeks in which Mengele had declared that Eva would die.

With each passing day and each falling night, Miriam was observed, monitored, and measured, as if the entire fate of the experiments depended on her sister’s survival. Eva asks what happened after the two weeks were over, and Miriam’s response is even more forceful.

After the deadline, she was immediately taken back to the laboratories where they injected her with multiple substances again, substances that left her body weak, feverish, and profoundly ill. Years later, when Miriam was an adult living in Israel, married, and trying to build a normal life, something strange began to emerge.

During her first pregnancy, she developed severe kidney infections that were resistant to all possible antibiotics. During her second pregnancy in 1963, the situation worsened dramatically, forcing Israeli doctors to conduct a thorough investigation into the cause of her condition.

That is when they discovered something devastating, which was that Miriam’s kidneys had never grown beyond the size of a ten-year-old child, leaving an adult body supported by childlike organs. Eva, distraught by this discovery, begged her sister not to get pregnant again, because each pregnancy turned into a battle between life and death.

But Miriam wanted to continue and had a third child. After giving birth, however, her kidneys began to fail irreversibly, and in 1987 they simply stopped working.

Eva had two kidneys and only one sister, so the decision didn’t require much thought for her. She donated her left kidney, offering Miriam a new chance at life, but the fight didn’t end there.

A year later, Miriam developed cancerous polyps in her bladder, and the doctors insisted that it was vital to find the medical records from Auschwitz containing the records of the substances injected into them as children. From them, perhaps they could understand and treat what was happening.

They searched and researched archives in various countries, consulting specialists, historians, and institutions, but never found anything. And so, without answers, Miriam died on June 6, 1993.

Months after Miriam’s death, Eva received an unexpected phone call, almost too strange to be real. A professor from Boston invited her to a lecture, which was nothing out of the ordinary so far.

But at the end of the conversation came the request that left her paralyzed for a few seconds, asking if she could bring a N4zi doctor. Eva was speechless because how could anyone imagine that she would have access to a doctor who had served in Auschwitz.

And yet a memory flashed through her mind like lightning, recalling that in 1992 she and Miriam had participated in a German documentary about Mengele’s twins. In the film appeared a N4zi doctor who had worked directly in the camp, an elderly and silent man who gave a brief interview under the name of Dr. Hans Münch.

If he was alive in 1992, perhaps, just perhaps, he was also alive in 1993. Eva took a deep breath, gathered her courage, and did what few would do by calling him, explaining who she was, mentioning the documentary, and relaying the professor’s invitation.

Münch immediately refused the trip, but to her surprise, he made another offer to receive her at his own home in Germany if she wanted to talk. And Eva did accept.

When she arrived at Münch’s house, she didn’t bring a list of questions, nor an elaborate plan, thinking they would talk about the documentary, perhaps about science, or perhaps about nothing. But sitting across from him, something escaped her lips before she even realized what she was saying.

She asked if he was in Auschwitz, if he went through a gas chamber, if he went inside, and if he knew how it worked. The silence that followed seemed to stretch, and then, calmly, he replied yes and added a phrase she never forgot.

He said that this was the nightmare he lived with every day of his life. Münch described everything without raising his voice and without dramatizing, just recounting it as he said he stayed outside, looking through a small window embedded in the metal door as the gas began to descend.

He observed every movement and every body falling, and when all the people, without exception, were motionless on the ground, he knew the process was over. That is when he signed a death certificate, without names, without identities, just the exact number of human beings murdered in that session, nothing more.

When the conversation ended, Eva felt she needed to take the next step by asking Münch to accompany her to Auschwitz in 1995 for the anniversary of the liberation. She wanted him to sign a written document in the ruins of the gas chamber, confirming exactly what he had just told her, and he didn’t hesitate, agreeing immediately.

Eva knew the exact value of that document, because with it in her hands, bearing the signature of a N4zi doctor who witnessed the workings of the gas chambers, she would have an irrefutable weapon against any Holocaust denier who one day dared to claim that the Holocaust didn’t happen. She could simply raise that paper before anyone who doubted her, and there, in those dry lines, was the absolute truth, signed by a N4zi .

She wanted to thank Dr. Münch for his willingness to record everything, but how could she thank a N4zi , and how could she express gratitude to someone who belonged to the same machine that destroyed her family? The idea seemed absurd, almost impossible to formulate, and yet Eva felt she needed to do something, even if she didn’t know what or how.

She didn’t tell anyone because it was too intimate, too confusing, and something she couldn’t even explain to herself. It didn’t make sense, but it remained there, silent and haunting her in her mind.

Then, ten months later on an ordinary morning, Eva woke up with an idea that came like a whisper, simple, direct, and unexpected. What if I wrote a letter of forgiveness to Dr. Münch?

Just like that, without warning, without analysis, and just an intuition, and the instant she thought of it, she knew he would appreciate this gesture. It would be something profound and meaningful, an Auschwitz survivor offering forgiveness to a N4zi doctor, and a gesture that carried more weight than any document.

But what Eva discovered in that moment was much greater, because she discovered that she had the power to forgive. A power that no one had given her, a power that no one could ever take away, and a power that for almost fifty years she hadn’t even imagined possessing.

She had lived as a victim her whole life, believing that nothing was in her hands. Writing this letter was not simple, and it took four months of memories, revisions, tears, and hesitations.

Eva didn’t know where to begin, nor what kind of words should compose a letter of forgiveness, as it was uncharted territory. When she finally finished, she sought help from her former English teacher, having the text revised and the errors corrected so everything was made clear.

They met three times, and on the third meeting, the teacher read the document carefully, looked up, and calmly said that it was very nice to forgive Dr. Münch, but her problem wasn’t with him, her problem was with Dr. Mengele. The words hit her like a door slamming shut, because Eva wasn’t ready to forgive Mengele and didn’t know if she ever would be, since the mere idea seemed to cross an impossible line.

But the teacher insisted gently yet firmly, asking her to pretend Mengele was in the room tonight when she got home and tell him she forgives him to see how she would feel. Eva didn’t promise, but it stayed in her mind as something strange, provocative, and in a way, liberating.

When she got home, she did something she never imagined she would do, sitting alone, picking up a dictionary, choosing twenty offensive words, and writing each one down. Then, standing, she read them all aloud to the imaginary Mengele that filled the room, directing every insult and every expression laden with decades of accumulated rage.

And finally, she took a deep breath and said that despite all this, she forgave him. The effect was immediate and she felt very good, surprisingly good, because at that moment in that silent room, something changed.

The little guinea pig from fifty years before, the girl torn from her family, had power over the angel of death of Auschwitz, and that power was hers alone. January 1995 arrives, marking fifty years after the liberation of the camp, and Eva returns to Auschwitz.

Dr. Münch goes with her, accompanied by his son, daughter, and granddaughter, while Eva takes her son and daughter. Before the ruins of the gas chamber, Eva reads her declaration of amnesty, a short but powerful document, and signs it while Dr. Münch signs his.

At that moment, Eva feels free from Auschwitz and free from Mengele. Most of the survivors denounced her then, and many still denounce it to this day, but Eva doesn’t care because she understood something fundamental.

Forgiveness isn’t about the perpetrator, but about the victim, making it an act of self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment. Eva Mozes Kor dedicated the rest of her life to speaking about the Holocaust, founding the CLES Children of Auschwitz N4zi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana.

She lectured at schools, universities, and conferences around the world, confronted Holocaust deniers, and educated generations. She passed away on July 4, 2019, at the age of eighty-five, during an educational trip to Poland near Auschwitz, the place where she almost died at age ten.

But her voice remains, her testimony remains, and her final message echoes that we cannot change what happened, which is the tragic part, but we can change how we relate to it. Eva Mozes Kor survived the impossible, lost her family, was used as a guinea pig, carried invisible wounds for decades, and yet she chose forgiveness.

Not because the perpetrators deserved it, but because she deserved to be free. Her story is not just about Auschwitz, but about human resilience, about refusing to let hatred have the last word, and about the radical power of a child who crawled across the floor of an extermination camp repeating to herself that she needed to survive.

She survived, she lived, and she ultimately won, because the greatest act of resistance against dehumanization is to insist until your last breath on remaining human.