INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor has taught the world a lesson of forgiveness.
Thursday, she was honored to receive the State of Indiana's highest award: The 2017 Sachem Award.
Kor told WTHR's Kevin Rader in a one-on-one interview she cannot imagine all that happened to her in the last 30 years since she decided to forgive her captors.
As she describes it, she was a human guinea pig for Dr. Josef Megele during World War II. Eva Kor and her sister were in the Aushchwitz death camp.
But the story doesn't end there. That is only the beginning.
Thirty years ago, she asked a Nazi Doctor to sign a document admitting to the horrors that went on there, and to her surprise, he did.
That led her to make a decision that would change her life.
"If he would have said, 'No,' the whole thing would have stopped right there. Every single step of the way there were hurdles, but he said, 'Yes'," she recalled. "Now I wanted to thank him. For the life of me, I did not know how to thank a Nazi. I didn't want to tell everyone about it because I know my friends and family would try to talk me out of thanking a Nazi."
It took her four months, but she wrote a letter of forgiveness and sent it to that doctor and it literally changed her life.
She went on to found the Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors museum in Terre Haute in 1985.
Gov. Eric Holcomb announced Kor's selection for the Sachem Award last month, saying she's a living embodiment of true compassion who has fought against bigotry and hatred.
After being awarded the Sachem Thursday, she was also named Grand Marshal for the 2017 IPL 500 Festival Parade.
Tonight on Eyewitness News, you'll hear what she has to say about that honor and receiving the Sachem today.
