INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - It was quite a day for Eva Mozes Kor.
She received the state’s highest honor Thursday in a ceremony at the War Memorial and then found out she will also be the Grand Marshal for the 2017 IPL 500 Festival Parade.
Some are victims. Some are survivors and some are big enough to forgive.
"It is my deep honor to present my first Sachem Award to Eva Mozes Kor," Governor Eric Holcomb announced in a ceremony at the war memorial. A Holocaust survivor Kor was subjected to the cruel experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele.
"Mengele never examined me but he looked at my chart and said too bad she is so young. She has only two weeks to live. I refused to die," Kor told me in a one on one interview.
She did survive and she even found a Nazi Dr. who confirmed the presence of the gas chambers used in Auschwitz.
"Now I wanted to thank him and for the life of me I did not know how to thank a Nazi. I did not want to tell anyone about it because my friends would have tried to talk me out of thanking a Nazi," Kor said.
It took her four months to write that letter of forgiveness but it changed her life. In the last year she has given lectures in Israel, London, Poland, Romania and Berlin. Thursday the women who calls Terre Haute home was in Indianapolis.
"To be honored with the highest honor in the state...to go from being treated like a subhuman, a worm, a nothing. We have come a long way," she observed.
And now you are grand chairman of the Indianapolis 500 Parade. What do you think of that I asked her? "I don't know. I'm going to have to pinch myself," she answered excitedly.
Hard to believe for a girl who age ten was told by Dr. Josef Mengele that she was going to die at Auschwitz.
"I always believed you should stand up to evil and the Nazi's were as evil as they come. My only way to stand up to them at age ten was to stay alive," she continued.
So she did and what's more she lived long enough to forgive them.
You are an example of forgiveness. How are you able to do that I asked her? "I am, I think, I'm lucky," she answered after a long pause.
Lucky to have found a Nazi doctor who admitted to the use of gas chambers in Auschwitz which prompted her forgiveness and ultimately led her to here to Indianapolis to receive the state’s highest honor.
