Auschwitz Survivor Explains Why She Shook Hands With a Former Nazi Prison Guard - And Then 'the Strangest Thing Happened

Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor did something totally unexpected at the trial of a former Nazi camp guard: She shook his hand and accepted a kiss from him.

Kor – who says she has forgiven the Nazis and encourages others to do the same – explained why she reached out to former SS Sgt. Oskar Groening, the man who has been nicknamed in the German media the “accountant of Auschwitz.”

I am sharing with you my face to face meeting with Oskar Groening the former Nazi guard. Two old people reaching out pic.twitter.com/XlooNvPpQ1

— Eva Mozes Kor (@EvaMozesKor) April 23, 2015

Inspiring! Why forgiveness is best revenge of all @thetimes https://t.co/yV5I0spa0C #forgiveness #Auschwitz #EvaKor pic.twitter.com/vrVOzEjPad

— J.N. PAQUET (@jnpaquet) April 25, 2015

In a post on Quora, Kor wrote that on the first day of Groening’s trial last week in a German courtroom she introduced herself to the former concentration camp guard and reached out to shake his hand.

While she said she believes Groening needs to take responsibility for his actions during the war, she said she wanted to appeal to him to educate young Germans about the terrible things the Nazis did and to encourage other former Nazis to do the same.

Her first attempt to talk to him didn’t exactly work out as she’d hoped.

“The strangest thing happened," Kor recalled. "He was trying to say something as he was sitting sideways in his chair. He turned white and fell backwards, not saying a word. He was holding onto my arm so he did not hit the floor. At that moment he was not a Nazi but an old man who fainted and I was trying to save him from falling.”

She continued, “I screamed, ‘He is falling and I can't hold onto him — he is a big old guy!’ This was not the interaction I was hoping for. I knocked out an old Nazi.”

Kor’s forgiving attitude is all the more remarkable considering she was immediately ripped from her parents and her two older sisters as soon as the cattle car they were transported in arrived at the notorious death camp in 1944.

Only because she and her sister Miriam were twins, age 10 at the time, the two girls were spared immediate transport to the gas chambers and were instead dispatched to the infamous doctor Josef Mengele who executed cruel genetic experiments on Jewish twins whom he used as human guinea pigs.

On another day of the trial, Kor decided to approach Groening again. She wrote:

He wanted to stand up but I said, "Please don't, we do not want a repetition of last time." I just shook his hand and said, "I appreciate the fact that you are willing to come here and face us. But I would like you to appeal to the old Nazis who are still alive to come forward and address the problem of neo-Nazis in Germany today. Because these young misguided Germans who want Hitler and fascism to come back — they will not listen to Eva Kor or any other survivor. You can tell them you were in Auschwitz, you were involved with the Nazi party, and it was a terrible thing."

As I was talking to him, he grabbed me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Well I probably wouldn't have gone that far, but I guess it is better than what he would have done to me 70 years ago.

After the unexpected exchange she told the Times of London, “He likes me, how about that? I am going back to the U.S. with a kiss on my cheek from a former Nazi.”

Kor noted that his move to kiss her proves that “you cannot predict what will happen when someone from the victims' side and someone from the perpetrators' side meet in a spirit of humanity.”

The survivor explained why she believes that “nothing good ever comes from anger”:

I know many people will criticize me for this photo, but so be it. It was two human beings seventy years after it happened. For the life of me I will never understand why anger is preferable to a goodwill gesture. Nothing good ever comes from anger. […]

I don’t think we should raise a statue in his honor, but he can serve as a good example to young people that what he participated in was terrible, that it was wrong, and that he is sorry that he was part of it. Now there is a message that has some usefulness for society.

Groening told the court Thursday that it was obvious to the guards at Auschwitz that Jews were not expected to ever be freed alive.

"I couldn't imagine that" happening, Groening told the court, the Associated Press reported.

Groening is being tried on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder between May and July 1944. Some 425,000 Hungarian Jews were transported by train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Nazi-occupied Poland during those three months where they were stripped of their belongings and most were sent straight to the gas chambers.

Groening told the court on Tuesday that he shared in the “moral guilt” for his actions but that it was up to the court to rule if he was guilty under the law.

Kor is an outspoken advocate for forgiveness and wrote an autobiographical account in the young adult book Surviving the Angel of Death: The Story of a Mengele Twin in Auschwitz.

“I will not permit myself to hate. I think hatred destroys the person who hates rather than the object of the hatred,” she wrote on Quora.