Good morning. I’ve been thinking about Eva Kor, who was recently interviewed on this programme. Eva Kor is the 81 year old Auschwitz survivor who gave evidence in the trial of 93 year old Oscar Groning – he was the SS guard who took and recorded the money of Jewish prisoners as they arrived at the death camp. When Eva had finished giving evidence against him she went over to where he was sitting and shook hands with him. He responded by pulling her towards him and kissing her. She said that she had spoken out at the trial to give voice to the victims and to help the world never to forget what had happened. But she also said, and this was a surprise, that she had forgiven the Nazis. There’s been much criticism of her for saying that, with people insisting that forgiveness can only be given where there is genuine repentance. I can see why. Forgiveness can sound like weakness as though what has been done doesn’t really matter.
But that isn’t what Eva Kor was saying. Her most startling remark was that to her, forgiveness is the most formidable form of revenge. Forgiving the perpetrators of Auschwitz meant that they lost the one thing they once had – their power over her life. The fact that she had forgiven Groning neither prevented her from testifying against him, nor stopped him from taking responsibility for his own actions. So repentance and justice are part of the picture, but as a response to forgiveness not as a condition of it.
What she is insisting on here is that by enacting forgiveness victims can escape from being trapped in a cycle of helplessness. She has found the strength to live freely, not defined by the horrors of her past. I find that astonishing, for not only did she lose the rest of her family to the gas chambers, she also came near to death herself, she and her twin sister were subject to Joseph Menegele’s medical experiments – and her sister never recovered from what had been done to her.
I suppose the difficult question is whether this means that forgiveness is ultimately independent of justice? Most of us would find that hard to take. Yet I am always struck when I read the Gospels how often Jesus forgives people before they show any sign of changing their ways. Of course they usually do repent in response to being forgiven but in theory they could have just shrugged it off.
The forgiveness declared by Eva Kor certainly invites repentance and Oscar Groning has already acknowledged his moral guilt. But perhaps the real significance of what she said was to announce the ultimate impotence of evil. Sin does not have the last word. We can choose to be free. We need that astonishing confidence in a world which would often tell us otherwise. It is the basis of all our faith and all our hope.