PIC: This Is The Moment A Holocaust Survivor Met Her Former Nazi Guard

This week, an image of 81-year-old Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor embracing Oskar Groening has gone viral. Oskar is a 93-year-old former Nazi guard at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the concentration camp at which Kor was held. Groening is currently on trial in Germany for his part in the mass murder of 300,000 Holocaust victims, facing three to 15 years in prison if found guilty. Kor attended Groening’s trial to testify against him, and in a moment of compassion and huge courage, decided to introduce herself to the former guard. Groening fainted when meeting her.   Telling Q&A, Kor said: “This was not the interaction I was hoping for. I knocked out an old Nazi.” She decided to re-approach Groening to shake his hand, and implore him to encourage other living Nazis to come forward to denounce fascism and address modern day neo-Nazism. According to The Washington Post, Kor hoped that young neo-Nazis who have no interest in listening to what a survivor has to say might instead be swayed if members of the former Nazi party denounce fascism themselves. Kor and her twin sister were the only two of her family to survive the concentration camps.  They were one of an estimated 1,500 pairs of twins subjected to cruel experiences by Nazi researcher Josef Mengele. In her testimony in court, Kor said she forgives Groening but that she still hopes he will be held accountable for his actions: “My forgiveness has nothing to do with the perpetrators. It is an act of self-healing, self-liberation, and self-empowerment. My forgiveness does not absolve the perpetrators from taking responsibility for their actions, nor does it diminish my need and right to ask questions about what happened at Auschwitz." Although she has faced some backlash for appearing to forgive a former Nazi guard, Kor stood her ground, saying: “For the life of me I will never understand why anger is preferable to a goodwill gesture. Nothing good ever comes from anger. Any goodwill gesture in my book will win over anger any time. The energy that anger creates is a violent energy. “If I had it my way, the dialogue between the survivors and perpetrators would have started a long time ago. And it would have helped the survivors cope and maybe heal themselves, but even more so not to pass the pain on to their children.”