I draw pictures, as I have done with Our Brown County since its first issue in 1995, and I love using them to tell a story. It is something I have done in one form or another since I was six or seven years old. I believed that Eva’ s story, which she had told in lectures, interviews, documentaries, and the written word, begged for a graphic depiction. With the aid of a grant from the Indiana Arts Commission I joined the CANDLES pilgrimage to Auschwitz / Birkenau in July of 2019. This, unfortunately, was Eva’ s final pilgrimage to the place of her terrible suffering and loss.
Sitting with Eva on the selection platform and between the ruins of the two main gas chamber / crematoriums at Birkenau on the final complete day of her life was a profound experience. Hearing her recount the experiences of her life— experiences she had told and retold— in this place of genocide and her own personal horror was both deeply emotional and transcendent. Eva read letters of forgiveness she had written several years before to her parents— her father for being especially hard on his cantankerous
daughter and her mother for not leaving Europe when they had the opportunity to go. As she read, the group gathered around began to cry and Eva stopped reading and focused on the tears and sobs of her pilgrims.
” Why are you crying?” she asked.“ This is a happy story. I survived. I beat Hitler. I beat Mengele. I beat the Nazis. I beat the Communists. And I am here to tell my story.”
Eva wanted all of us to tell her story, the story of the Holocaust, so we would never forget and always work to keep this grim history from repeating.
My graphic biography, Forgiveness: the Story of Eva Kor, Survivor of the Auschwitz Twin Experiments, was published by Red Lightning Books in October of 2021. This is my way of telling her story.
The book is available at Morgenstern Books, 849 South Auto Mall Road in Bloomington, and can be ordered through other local bookstores. It is also available online from Amazon and all the other internet bookstores.
25 % of the book’ s proceeds is donated to CANDLES. •
Jan./ Feb. 2022 • Our Brown County 29