'Forgive your worst enemy, it will heal your soul and liberate you.'

'Forgive your worst enemy, it will heal your soul and liberate you.'

Eva Moses Kor. Holocaust survivor.

by Leon

Jerusalem Mon 30th May 2005

The sufferer and his persecutor.

Who will forgive the person who has caused you suffering? He was cruel. He was evil.
He made you suffer so much that your world remained dark and dreary for the rest of your life.
Who can forgive the person who made you suffer?
The problem with suffering is the feeling that you want to revenge your suffering.
You want the person who made you suffer to suffer too.
Your heart is full of hate for the person who made you suffer.
The feeling of vengance and hate dominate the life of the sufferer for long after the suffering has stopped.

All pleasure in the world is concentrated on vengeance and hate and that's no pleasure.

Eva Moses Kor.

One of the women who suffered at the hands of Dr. Mengele in the Auschwitz concentration camp forgave Dr. Mengele the suffering he caused her. Her name is one to be remembered.
It is Eva Moses Kor.
In an articel in the Yediot Ahronot newspaper, in Israel, on Friday 28th May, Ronen Bergman wrote about how she had forgiven Mengele.
"I forgive Dr. Mengele and all the other doctors, that carried out shocking experiments on my twin sister, Miriam, and I. I forgive them for killing my parents, that they robbed me of the rest of my family, that they took my childhood from me, that they turned my life into hell, that they created for me nightmares that followed me every night in the last 60 years.
In my name, and only in my name I forgive them for all thses terrible things."
Dr. Joseph Mengele
Mengele was known as Dr. Death. He was obsessed with performing experiments on identical twins.
He obtains the subjects for his experiments from the line of Jews at the entrance to the gas chamber.
He chose hundreds of twins only a few survived. The story began to be told only 40 years after,
because the trauma of these people was so great they couldn't even speak about it.
"I feel that all my life is an echo of what they did to me in Auschwitz. An echo against which I struggled all my life untill I succeeded in bringing myself to the situation of forgiveness and only then I began to live."
In 1993, in a radio broadcast in Berlin she met Dr. Monash, one of the doctors who worked with Mengele. She asked him if he knew about the gas chambers. He answered "This is the nightmare that I live with to this day." He signe the death cerificates after everyone had died. At Eva's request Dr. Monash signed a declaration which was read at Auschwitz on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, that he had seen the gas chambers and the people being lead into them. Eva read her declaration of forgiveness.
"I was no longer a prisoner of my tragic past, at long last I was free. So I say to everyone 'forgive your worst enemy, it will heal your soul and liberate you.'
"The way I see things most of the governments and world leaders carry a heavy burden in the effort to achieve peace. In my opinion they have failed badly because they didn't promote the subject. They didn't encourage the survivors of tragedies like the holocaust, and didn't help them to forgive their enemies so that they could heal themselves.
Most of the governments and world leaders promote only one thing and support only that - justice. In that way they are committing the survivors to eternal suffering. How many holocaust survivors have been bealed by trials and pursuits of war criminals. Revenge is good for lawyers. It is good for Holywood movies. For us, the survivors, it doesn't help at all."
"To forgive doesn't mean to forget." "I see a world in which leaders will do something to promote a law of forgiveness...."