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FORGIVING DR. MENGELE
Directed & Produced by: Bob Hercules & Cheri Pugh.
Director of Photography: Keith Walker.
Edited by: David E. Simpson.
Music by: Mark Bandy.
Released by: First Run.
Country of Origin: USA. 80 min. Not Rated.

In this quite moving documentary, Eva Mozes Kor reaches out to other Holocaust survivors by emphasizing forgiveness as a way to reconcile with the past. Kor and her sister Miriam were subject to unfathomable experiments conducted on twins by Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Her controversial conviction that forgiving victimizers imbues power and can gradually heal the victim's pain provides the film's central dilemma: should perpetrators not be forgiven, lest their crimes be forgotten, or can forgiveness instead help one cope with overwhelming destruction?

Its refusal, or its inability, to provide an unambiguous answer makes this documentary effective. Kor, whose sister eventually died of kidney failure precipitated by Mengele’s experiments, is compelled to seriously consider forgiveness when, on a futile search for Mengele’s medical files to pinpoint what killed Miriam, she meets former Nazi Dr. Hans Münch, who was found to have saved the lives of Jews.

Other viewpoints challenging Kor are succinctly presented, including one survivor’s contention that Kor has no right to speak for the dead. And as one Holocaust scholar puts it, her gesture consists of “cheap grace”; that by forgiving she excuses forgetting – only God can forgive. Indeed, this examination of forgiveness is endlessly fascinating and philosophically resonant. Is forgiveness possible without apology? Is Kor’s forgiveness more akin to that of a “pardon,” being given from a position of strength as Eva herself seems to suggest? Or, is forgiveness of the Nazis a form of dishonoring their victims? (Then there is the macabre realization that Eva’s forgiving Mengele is a form of poetic justice.)

Featured are riveting scenes of Eva’s cluelessness on the current Mideast conflict, or where the viewer senses the horrifying memories she recalls by merely visiting an ophthalmologist, as well as of her adult children’s reactions to her ambition. When she tells her son she’s inviting Münch to Auschwitz’s 50th anniversary of its liberation and reveals to her daughter plans for a Holocaust museum in Indiana – where Eva lives – both her kids are baffled.

Moreover, the camerawork superbly evokes how Kor crawled on a concentration camp floor and her claustrophobia years later while flying on a plane with Germans on her way to visit Auschwitz. And when neo-Nazis target her museum, Eva’s story is rendered more poignant because her very efforts continue to keep the Holocaust in the public consciousness. Reymond Levy
May 18, 2006