An Auschwitz survivor, the crimes Eva and countless others endured directly resulted in the Nuremburg Code, the basis for human subject protections today.
Ethics in Medicine and Research: Lessons from Dr. Mengele
Eva Mozes was born Jan. 31, 1934 in Romania. In March of 1944, she and her family were told by gendarmes to gather belongings because they were going to be relocated. They were deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
On the selection platform at Auschwitz, Eva and her sister Miriam were identified as twins and taken to join other twins who became part of Dr. Josef Mengele's medical experiments. As twins, they were seen as nature's natural guinea pigs. One child was used as a control and the other had experiments conducted on her/him. If a twin died, the other twin was killed by an injection into the heart and comparative autopsies were done on the two.
Eva and Miriam survived the deadly Nazi experiments at Auschwitz. Their parents, grandparents, two older sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins - approximately 117 family members - were killed in the Holocaust.
In 1950 Eva and Miriam went to Israel and became members of a kibbutz, populated mostly by orphans. Eva later married an American tourist, Michael Kor, also a concentration camp survivor, and came to the United States.
Eva founded C.A.N.D.L.E.S., an organization devoted to the twins who survived the horrible experiments of Dr. Mengele. She located 122 survivors of Mengele's experiments, living in ten countries and four continents. She later opened the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust Museum and Education center.
Today Eva devotes much of her time to speaking about what happened to her and to serving the Museum.