One day in 1944, my family and I were arrested packed into cattle trains with no food or water. We were taken to Poland and keft on the selection platform in Auschwitz. A genetic guard spotted me and my identical twin sister Miriam cling to my mother. He towed us from my mother's arms and let us away. I remember looking back at my mother. Idid not know at the time but I would never see her again.
In the filthy floor where the scattered corpses of three little girls. Their bodies were naked, and their eyes were wide open. It was a horrifying look. I have never seen anybody dead before, so that hit me very very hard and I made a silent pledge that I will do whatever is within my power to make sure that Miriam and I will not end up on that latrine floor and that we somehow will survive and walk out of this camp alive. We were naked for hours and every part of our bodies were measured. It was horrible and humiliating.
The doctor said: "Too bad, she's so young. She's only two weeks to live."
I knew he was right, but I refuses to die. If I die, Miriam would have been given a lethal injection, so he could cut open both of our bodies and compare the autopsies. For the following two weeks, I was between life and death. And all I remember crawling on the barrack floor because I know Hoover could walk and as I was crawling I would fade in and out of the consciousness and I kept telling myself I must survive; I must survive.
Nine months later we returned home only to find that no body else from our family survived to finf only three crumbled pictures and that was all that was left of my family.
In 1987, I dinated one of my kidney to save her (Miriam) but she died in 1993, and I was devasted. She was the only one from the family who was alive. I was angry. I was heading to Germany to meet an athlete dictor. I was unbelievably nervous and scared. Dr. Moon at the time was 82 years old. He greeted me with kindness, respect, and consideration. I was bolwn away. a Nazi treating me with respect. Dr. Hans Mood was a bacteriologist at Auschwitz, but he also had a secondary job that he was stationed outside the gas chambers and when people were dead he would one death certificate no names just the number if people who were murdered and he said to me "this is my problem. This is a nightmare that I live with."
I askedhim if he was willing to go with me to Auschwitz and make the same statement that he made to me, and he said he would love to.
I knew that was a crazy idea to Canarsie a survivor of Auschwitz to an arthi. People eould think that I have lost my mind. I tried to figure out how to thank him,and after 10 months a simple idea popped into my head "How about a letter of forgiveness from me, the survivor if Auschwitz ?" I knew that that was a meaningful gift for him, but what I discovered for myself was lift-changing that I had the power to forgive. No one could give me that power; no one could take it away to challenge myself I decided I could even forgive Mangala the person who had put me through to hell. It wasn't easy, but I felt an enormous weight had been lifted from me. I finally felt free. Who decided then I, as a victim, must before the rest of my life be sad, angry, feel hopeless, and helpless? I refuse it. You can never change what happened in the past. All you can do is change how you react to it. My sister snd I were made into human guinea pigs. Our whole family was murdered, but I have the power to forgive and so do you.