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04/24/2012 01:20 AM

Jewish Memorial Center honors Holocaust victims with guest lecture

Utica's Jewish Community Center honors Holocaust Remembrance Day every year with special guest speakers with different perspectives of the Holocaust. This year's speaker told her firsthand account of the medical experiments doctors at Auschwitz performed on sets of twins.Our Andrew Sorensen tells us about the remarkable woman who turned her nightmare into a message of hope and forgiveness.

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UTICA, N.Y. -- Hundreds of people crowded Utica's Jewish Community Center to hear Holocaust survivor Eva Kor's story Monday night. She was ten when the Nazis took her and her family from their small town Romanian home.

"We were in a ghetto for about seven weeks, and then loaded onto cattle carts that arrived in Auschwitz in May of 1944," she recalled.

A Nazi officer noticed Eva and her twin sister on the selection platform and took them away, never to see her family again.

"Thirteen sets of little girls arrived in Auschwitz on that transport and we became part of the Mengele twins experiment."

Eva and 3,000 other twins endured Doctor Josef Mengele's horrific experiments in addition to daily life of a concentration camp.

"There on the filthy latrine floor, were the scattered corpses of three children," she said.

She vowed to do anything to get out alive with her sister.

"I had an image of Miriam and me walking out of this camp alive."

She did what she could, including bearing Dr. Mengele's experiments six days a week.

"[They would] take a lot of blood from my left arm, at the same time, give me a minimum of five injections into my right arm... those were the deadly ones."

Her hope of one day being released kept her alive, even fighting off near-deadly diseases with minimal food.

"We dreamed about that for nine months...to walk out of this camp alive, was an unbelievable experience."

She eventually overcame what the Nazi doctors did to her, and even worked with one for a medical conference.

She shares her story of how her vow of hope saved her life, hoping it can help someone to persevere, forgive and overcome.