Surviving the Angel of Death (2009) is a Holocaust memoir by Eva Mozes Kor, written with Lisa Rojany Buccieri. The book recounts Kor’s experience as a 10-year-old child who, along with her identical twin sister, Miriam, was subjected to horrific medical experiments under the direction of Dr. Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944. The narrative follows the sisters from their childhood in rural Romania through their imprisonment, liberation, and eventual journey to a new life in Israel. The memoir explores themes of The Complexity of Healing from Systemic Oppression, The Importance of Relationships in Survival, and Medicine Betrayed by Ideology.

Eva Mozes Kor (1934-2019) became a prominent public educator and activist dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and survivor advocacy. In 1984, she and Miriam founded CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors), an organization that located 122 other surviving Mengele twins across the globe. In 1995, Kor opened the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana. Her life and controversial philosophy of forgiveness were the subject of numerous media features and the award-winning 2018 documentary, Eva: A-7063. The international bestseller Surviving the Angel of Death serves as a key testament to her story and her mission to promote healing through personal empowerment.

This guide refers to the 2020 Tanglewood Publishing New Edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of racism, religious discrimination, child abuse, child death, graphic violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, and illness or death.

Plot Summary

Eva Mozes Kor’s memoir recounts her experiences as a child survivor of the Holocaust, focusing on the months she and her identical twin sister, Miriam, spent as subjects of Nazi medical experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the decades of healing that followed. The narrative moves from Kor’s early childhood in rural Romania through imprisonment, liberation, and emigration to Israel, concluding with her adult discovery of forgiveness as a means of self-healing.

Kor and Miriam were born on January 31, 1934, in Portz, a small village in Transylvania, Romania. Their parents, Alexander and Jaffa Mozes, were the only Jewish family in the village. Alexander was a wealthy farmer; Jaffa was educated and generous. The twins were the youngest of four sisters, with older siblings Edit and Aliz. Kor’s strong-willed personality led to frequent clashes with her father, who wanted a son; she later recognizes these conflicts toughened her for what lay ahead. Antisemitism pervaded Romania from the twins’ birth. In 1935, the Iron Guard, a violent antisemitic political party, jailed Alexander on fabricated charges. After his release, he urged Jaffa to emigrate to Palestine, but she refused, unwilling to uproot four children or leave her ailing mother. In the summer of 1940, Hitler ceded northern Transylvania to Hungary, and Hungarian forces occupied the village. At school, new teachers introduced antisemitic propaganda, classmates beat the twins, and the family’s attempted nighttime escape was stopped at gunpoint in late September 1943.

In March 1944, when Kor and her twin were 10, Hungarian gendarmes marched the family to a ghetto in Şimleu Silvaniei, an open field enclosed by barbed wire where over 7,000 Jews were confined without shelter. Guards tortured Alexander during interrogation. Jaffa, weakened by typhoid fever, grew despairing. In May, guards herded the family into packed cattle cars and sent them traveling without food, water, or sanitation for three days. Alexander realized after hearing guards speak German that they had crossed into German-occupied Poland. He gathered his children and made them promise that any survivor would go to Palestine. On the fourth morning, the doors opened at Auschwitz.

On the selection platform, SS guards sorted prisoners, separating families. Kor lost sight of her father and older sisters and never saw them again. A guard spotted Kor and Miriam in their matching burgundy dresses and asked Jaffa if they were twins. When she confirmed, the guard tore the girls away. Kor watched her mother struggle with outstretched arms before being thrown into another group. It was the last time Kor saw her. Being identified as twins meant they would become subjects of Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician known as the Angel of Death, who oversaw the selection platform and directed prisoners to forced labor or the gas chambers.

The twins were tattooed, processed, and housed in a filthy converted horse barn in Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, alongside a few hundred other twins ages 2 to 16. That first night, Kor discovered dead children on the latrine floor and made a silent pledge to keep herself and Miriam alive. Mengele established a strict routine: Three days a week, doctors spent hours measuring every feature of the twins’ bodies, comparing each twin to her counterpart, and taking photographs and X-rays. On alternate days, doctors drew blood from one of Kor’s arms while injecting unknown substances into the other. Mengele’s goal was to discover the secret of producing multiple births to increase the population of what Hitler called the Aryan “Master Race.” Kor focused only on living one more day.

One Saturday in July, Kor received an injection that caused a raging fever, red patches, and severe swelling. She was taken to the camp infirmary, a barracks where people were sent to die. Mengele visited and remarked that she had only two weeks to live. Kor pledged to prove him wrong. Receiving no food or medicine, she crawled nightly to a faucet at the far end of the barracks, sometimes losing consciousness along the way. Miriam saved her own bread ration for a week and had it delivered through Mrs. Csengeri, a family friend also imprisoned at Auschwitz. After two weeks, Kor’s fever broke, and she manipulated her thermometer readings until she was released.

She returned to find Miriam near total collapse. During Kor’s illness, Miriam had been held in solitary confinement and injected with substances that permanently stunted her kidney growth. Kor later learned that Mengele’s plan had been to kill Miriam upon Kor’s death and perform simultaneous autopsies on both twins; Kor’s survival thwarted this plan. Determined to restore Miriam, Kor began stealing potatoes from the camp kitchen. The twins ate potatoes several times a week, and Miriam gradually regained strength and the will to live.

As autumn 1944 turned to winter, Allied bombing intensified. Jewish members of the Sonderkommando, prisoners forced to burn corpses, rebelled and blew up Crematorium IV. In the chaotic final weeks, SS guards ordered forced marches, destroyed crematoria to eliminate evidence, and killed 1,200 of 8,200 remaining prisoners during a forced march to the main Auschwitz barracks. Kor and Miriam became separated. Kor searched for 24 hours, screaming her sister’s name, barracks to barracks, until she found Miriam in a doorway. They vowed never to separate again. On January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers emerged through heavy snowfall, distributing food and chocolate. The Soviets dressed the twins in the more familiar striped uniforms of Holocaust victims and filmed them walking from the camp numerous times for war propaganda.

The journey home took months. With help from Mrs. Csengeri, who signed papers claiming to be their aunt, the twins traveled through Poland and the Soviet Union before reaching Romania in late September. They found their family home empty and stripped of possessions; their parents and sisters had never returned. The twins joined Aunt Irena, their father’s youngest sister, in Cluj. For five years, they endured communist rule, antisemitism, and nightmares. In June 1950, they boarded one of the last ships to leave Romania before its borders closed, arriving in Haifa, Israel. They were sent to a Youth Aliyah Village, an agricultural school for young immigrants. For the first time since Auschwitz, Kor slept without nightmares and celebrated her Jewish heritage freely.

In the Epilogue, Kor traces her adult life. She served eight years in the Israeli Army before marrying Michael (Mickey) Kor, an American Holocaust survivor, in 1960, and moving to Terre Haute, Indiana. In 1984, she and Miriam co-founded CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors), locating 122 surviving Mengele twins across 10 countries. Miriam’s kidneys, stunted since the Auschwitz injections, failed in 1987. Kor donated her left kidney, extending Miriam’s life until June 6, 1993.

After Miriam’s death, Kor met Dr. Hans Münch, a former Nazi doctor stationed at Auschwitz, who agreed to sign an affidavit confirming the gas chamber operations. Searching for a way to thank him, Kor arrived at the idea of forgiveness. On January 27, 1995, at Auschwitz, she read a personal statement forgiving her persecutors and felt a 50-year burden lift from her shoulders. She also forgave her parents, whom she had resented as a child for not taking action to escape sooner when they still had the chance, understanding they had done the best they could. Kor opened the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute and articulated her core belief: Forgiveness is not about condoning perpetrators but is an act of self-healing and self-empowerment.

An Afterword by Peggy Porter Tierney, publisher and board chair emerita of the CANDLES Holocaust Museum, describes Kor’s final years, including international fame and the controversy her forgiveness generated among survivors who felt the Holocaust was unforgivable. Kor always stressed that her forgiveness was personal. She died on July 4, 2019, in Krakow, Poland, during a trip to Auschwitz.