TVScope: Forgiving Dr Mengele, BBC2 Wednesday, April 27th
We live in a litigious age of victim culture. You only have to listen to Liveline to hear how often minor injustices are "milked" for their potential to provide a victim identity badge.
This remarkable documentary Forgiving Dr Mengele should be compulsory viewing for all whingers and complainers in the benchmark it provided as to what real suffering is and how it is possible to thrive by forgiving the unforgivable.
As a 10-year-old, Jewish child, Eva Kora and her identical twin sister Miriam were spared from the gas chambers in Auschwitz only to be used as human guinea pigs by the notorious Dr Josef Mengele. She suffered dreadfully as he induced high fevers by injecting her with germs and chemicals.
"Dying then," she reflected "was very easy, living was a full time job." This indomitable will to live drove her to steal food and to crawl to get water to counteract the fevers. One of the most poignant scenes showed 70-year-old Eva viewing jerky black and white film footage of two wide-eyed little girls, surrounded by electrified barbed wire fence as they walked out hand in hand on the day Auschwitz was liberated.
"Boy, you were a tough cookie," she says admiringly to the child she was. The intervening 60 years have proved just how tough and remarkable she is. She moved to America, married and had two children. Life was far from easy as, with no English, she had to cope with anti-Semitism and constant ill health as a result of the chemicals and germs Mengele had injected into her. Yet the feisty 70-year-old working out in the gym refused to indulge in any self-pity. "I had two choices, I could bend and become a victim or I could forgive and claim my power back" is how Eva saw her options then.
There was no analysis of what enabled Eva to go through the painful process of forgiving, but it seemed that the same will to live that she had as child stood to her. She instinctively knew that while she had physically escaped form Mengele he still had to potential to emotionally annihilate her. "I gave myself the gift of freedom," she concluded. She came across as rare real life proof of the psychological truth that while allowing oneself to feel the full fury of hate when one has been abused is often a healthy part of the recovery process, it is only healthy if one can also learn to let it go.
On a trip to Poland Eva was saddened by the contrast between how she felt and the unhappiness of other survivors who were unable to share her desire to forgive. She experienced their spirits as heavy from the weight of their anger and bitterness. What was unspoken here was how Eva had won a psychological victory by refusing to give in to her desire to de-humanise Mengele in the same way as he had dehumanised her in order to torture her.
Her forgiveness did not involve forgetting and her liberated energy went into creating a holocaust museum. Ironically, it was the hate-filled actions of a right-wing group in burning down the museum that brought Eva's hope-filled message to international attention. She has since then brought Gandhi's truism "if we all live by 'an eye for an eye' the world would be blind" right back into the black heart of Auschwitz.
The closing images were fittingly of Eva in a defiantly bright red hat and vivid blue coat, a human beacon of hope, walking through the grey driving sleet in that most horrible of places where she had refused to die. This documentary gave a message of hope to all victims of extreme abuse. What a shame this great message of hope was buried in a 12.30 am slot rather than being given the prominence it deserved.