The Firebombing of the Terre Haute Museum A Hoosier Community Responds to an Assault on Collective Memory

WILLIAM B. PICKETT

he events of a night in November 2003 in Terre Haute, , re- T minded local citizens that historical truth, though often unsettling, is also precious-and that its preservation keeps us in contact with es- sential principles of human dignity and morality. That night an arsonist destroyed a small museum dedicated to the preservation of the memory of . The identity and intent of the arsonist remains un- known, but it is doubtful that the response this violent act elicited was the one intended. In the days and weeks that followed, a sizeable group of citizens, including thousands of school children, came forward to of- fer support. Using newspaper articles, school fundraising activities, and electronic mail, they had within four months obtained donations sufficient to begin to rebuild the museum. By their spontaneous, posi- tive response to an act of hate, these citizens created a new and consid- erably larger awareness in their community of the importance of the museum and its founder, a Holocaust survivor. They also revealed an

William B. Pickett is a professor of history at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute.

INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 100 (September 2004). 0 2004, Tiustees of Indiana University 244 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

awareness of the nature and causes of genocide-something they had gained from a variety of sources, including books and articles, Hollywood films, television programs, the Internet, curricular reform in the schools, visits to a newly created national Holocaust museum, and by 2003, per- haps most important, from continued violent assaults on civil societies by terrorist groups and brutal regimes. The cities and small towns of Indiana and Illinois are filled with ar- chitecture and sculpture that commemorate politicians, authors, and wars. In Crawfordsville, seventy miles to the north of Terre Haute, for example, stands the birthplace (a white, two-story, neo-classical mansion) of Henry S. Lane, the United States senator who nominated Abraham Lincoln for president at the Republican convention of 1860. Crawfordsville also boasts the home and museum of Lew Wallace, Civil War Union general and au- thor of Ben Hur. Greencastle, thirty miles to the northeast, houses DePauw University, formerly Indiana Asbury Institute, a nineteenth-century Meth- odist seminary. The institute’s original building is still in use. On the nearby town square stands a monument to a different aspect of the city’s history: the sacrifices of local soldiers in World War 11. A German V-1 buzz bomb, one of the aerial weapons that Nazi Germany used to terrorize Great Brit- ain in the 1940s, rests, now inert, on a concrete podium above U.S. High- way 231 as it loops around the Putnam County Courthouse. Terre Haute boasts a similarly rich historical culture. The comfort- able two-story, Victorian frame house that was the home of Eugene V. Debs, four-time Socialist candidate for president at the beginning of the twentieth century, is a living museum. Vigo County’s memorial to its war veterans was, for many years, a Korean War-vintage F-84 fighter bomber (the first of its type capable of carrylng an atomic bomb) parked on a corner of the courthouse lawn. This strangely-out-of-place aircraft re- minded local residents of the sacrifices made by their young men over fifty years ago in Korea. Recently, a group of citizens working with veter- ans and Indiana State University designed and constructed a new veter- ans’ memorial plaza at the courthouse, moving the F-84 to a less prominent location. Such is the physical fabric of American communities, a nexus of ob- jects from the past that provides clues to history and its lessons. The nation’s founding fathers considered an educated citizenry essential to the sur- vival of individual freedom. Hoosier children begin to learn the history of their state and country in the fourth grade. Illinois children also learn about the Holocaust, something the Illinois legislature mandated more than a decade ago. THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 245

CANDLES Holocaust Museum in Terre Haute shortly after it was firebombed on November 18, 2003. A spray-painted message, “Remem- ber Timmy McVeigh,’ left by the arsonist is partly visible at the right. Photograph by Mary Wright, courtesy CANDLES Holocaust Museum

At about midnight (the Terre Haute fire marshal’s estimate is 12:12 A.M.) on November 18,2003, someone threw a brick through a window of the CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazis’ Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) Holocaust Museum and Education Center at 1532 South Third Street. The perpetrator or perpetrators then splashed gasoline into the structure and struck a match. The inferno destroyed artifacts-books, let- ters, photographs, and posters, as well as models made by school children depicting the degradation and inhumanity of the concentration camps where, from 1942 to 1945, the Nazi regime murdered more than six mil- lion European Jews and several million other persons. Within minutes the museum was ruined. Firefighters extinguished the flames before the building-a one-story, seventy-five-by-twenty-five-foot brick structure- caved in; the place was gutted, only its trusses left standing. The small crowd that gathered to view the damage could see scrawled in black spray paint beside the door in large letters: “Remember Timmy McVeigh.”’

“‘Arsonist Reduces CANDLES Holocaust Museum to Ashes,” Terre Haute Tribune Star, Novem- ber 19, 2003. 246 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Within twenty-four hours Terre Haute and neighboring communi- ties rallied to support the museum’s founder, Eva Mozes Kor, a Rumanian Jewish immigrant and survivor of Dr. ’s experiments on iden- tical-twin children at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp com- plex in . Responding to an e-mail alert the next day, some 150 citizens, joined by Republican gubernatorial hopeful Mitch Daniels (who had driven the seventy miles from Lafayette), gathered in the museum’s parking lot to hold up signs labeling the fire a “hate crime,” to hear speak- ers, and, finally, to join hands in front of television cameras, forming a human chain around the burned-out structure.2Over the next few days school children began to raise money. Mary Wright, the museum’s educa- tion director, received more than seven hundred telephone calls and e- mails offering moral and financial support from locations as distant as England, South America, and . A local elementary school, Dixie Bee, embarked on a fundraiser for which students engaged in “penny wars.” They were asked to bring in “5cents today, 10 cents tomorrow, 25 cents Tuesday, and $1 on Wednesday.” A teacher at Terre Haute North High School and her students took collections at the local Wal-Mart between noon and 8 P.M. on Sunday. The response was overwhelming. Meanwhile, the International Association of Arson Investigators announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the arson- ist, and the Anti-Defamation League offered an additional $2,500.3 By the end of the week, police, assisted by the FBI, had arrested an individual, whom they characterized as “a drifter,” for parole violation. The suspect had served time in prison for the arson of an Oregon Planned Parenthood clinic and had lived in Terre Haute for six months. Witnesses recalled that he had made anti-Semitic remarks. A federal grand jury in- dicted him the following month.4 But no evidence turned up linking him to the fire, and authorities were uncertain that they had found the culprit. Still, by the middle of March 2004-within just four months of the at- tack-local citizens, with assistance from outside contributors, had raised $200,000 to help rebuild the mu~eum.~

2The author was a participant. 3“WorldwideSupport Pours in for Museum,” Terre Haute Tribune Star, November 21, 2003; “A Crime of Hate,” ibid., November 19, 2003. ‘+“FelonTorched Clinic in ’~OS,”ibid., November 25, 2003; “FBI Joins Museum Fire Investiga- tion,” ibid., November 20,2003; “GrandJury Indicts Drifter on Firearms Charge,” ibid., Decem- ber 18, 2003. 5Eva Kor, telephone conversation with author, March 12, 2004. THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 247

Terre Haute in the late fall of 2003 was in many ways a typical me- dium-sized midwestern city. Located close to the site where the Wabash River becomes the border with Illinois, the city was by 1910 the most important urban area in the Indiana-Illinois coal fields and the home of significant numbers of European working-class immigrants6 In 1936, the United Mine Workers, protesting wages and working conditions (and perhaps following the local legacy of Debs), had walked out of the mines, and workers in other industries followed, initiating one of only three gen- eral strikes in American history The strike lasted two weeks but National Guardsmen, called out by the governor, patrolled the streets for six months. As the twentieth century wore on, Terre Haute prospered but did not grow. The high-sulfur, low-BTU variety of coal mined locally became less profitable in an era of internal-combustion engines.’ As a result, Terre Haute’s population declined from 70,000 in 1910 to 60,000 by the end of the century.8 With completion of Interstate 70 in 1969 and the subsequent con- struction of Honey Creek Mall three miles south of the central business district, retail businesses evacuated the downtown area. One by one, the ornate Victorian structures came down. The Terre Haute House hotel, a neo-classical, nine-story landmark made of yellow brick and limestone, closed in 1969 and soon was abandoned. Once the center of the city’s social life, it remains standing, a neglected and decaying hulk. Declining population and the harsh effects of twentieth-century ur- banization on the downtown area, however, did not prevent Terre Haute from remaining a vibrant and productive community. The city, including West Terre Haute across the Wabash, was home to three colleges: Indiana State University, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (in 2003, accord- ing to US.News and World Report rankings, the number-one undergradu- ate engineering school in the United States), and St. Mary-of-the-Woods College (the nation’s oldest Catholic liberal arts college for women, founded in 1840 by Sister Theodore Guerin and the home of the Sisters of Provi- dence). Combined, they attracted some thirteen thousand students each year.

6WilliamB. Pickett, “Terre Haute, Indiana: Causes and Effects of Failure to Grow, 1920-1970” (paper delivered at the Indiana History Conference, November 4, 1978), 6-7. ’Ibid., 8-9. sIbid., 9, 12; areaconnect, “Terre Haute Population and Demographics,” http://terrehaute. areaconnect.com/statistics.htm. 248 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

Local industry included manufacturing facilities for Eli Lilly and Company fifteen miles to the north; Pfizer, some ten miles to the south; and Great Dane trailers, located both in Terre Haute and in Brazil, fifteen miles to the east. Sony Corporation’sDigital Audio Disc Corporation manu- factured compact digital music and video discs in Terre Haute and distrib- uted them by means of a mail-order CD club (formerly the Columbia Record Club) headquartered in the city. Smaller industries sprang up in the late 1990s to support the large Toyota assembly plant in Princeton, eighty-four miles to the south. In the 1940s, the city welcomed a federal maximum-security prison, which was built along the Wabash five miles to the southwest and underwent several expansions in succeeding de- cades. Terre Haute in 2003 remained an important center of local govern- ment, finance, real estate, and the practice of law. Terre Haute’s service clubs and organizations included Rotary, Opti- mists, Kiwanis, and Leadership Terre Haute. There was a council for eco- nomic development, a visitors’ and tourism bureau, and a chamber of commerce. The city was home to churches of many denominations and ethnic affiliations ranging from Syrian Orthodox to Unitarian, a county historical society and museum, a children’s science museum, a fire and policemen’s museum, a boys’ club, a chapter of the Council for Domestic Abuse, a YWCA, a YMCA, and a public library with a superb local history collection and community meeting rooms. The city had four historic districts-three residential and one com- mercial. Several of the downtown’s historic business structures had be- come restaurants or shops, while Hulman and Company’s eight-story, red-brick and white-sandstone building, completed in 1893 and home of Clabber Girl baking powder, still stood at the city’s center. Like most midwestern cities at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Terre Haute’s residential districts were segregated socio-economically and to a large extent racially Most African Americans, who had remained at about six percent of the population over the decades, lived in two run- down, segregated districts. Despite an atmosphere of good will in which newcomers were welcomed, more subtle forms of discrimination were practiced by Protestants against both a sizeable Catholic population and by Christians generally against a less-numerous but socially prominent Jewish population. Eva Mozes Kor is one member of that local Jewish community, though her story is far more dramatic than most. She and her twin sister, Miriam, were daughters of a prosperous Jewish farmer named Alexander Mozes and his wife, Jaffa, from the Rumanian province of Transylvania. In 1943 THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 249

Kor and her twin sister, Miriam, at age one. They were born in Rumania’s Transylvania region just as Adolf Hitler began his rise to power in Germany. “I was born in the wrong place, at the wrong time, the wrong religion and the wrong sex,” she says. Courtesy Eva Mozes Kor

and 1944, they were among the many sets of twin children who were used for human genetic and other medical experiments by the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration campsg The Mozes family’s persecution, beginning in 1940, occurred in stages, each one more severe than the previous. After Hungary, newly allied with Germany, annexed Transylvania in 1940, local Nazi party members began harassing the family In the autumn of 1943, local officials placed the Mozes family under house arrest. The officials forced them, along with all other Jews in the country, to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothes and to obtain permission to leave their farm. As things became worse, the twins, their two older sisters, and parents attempted to abandon their home, but Nazi thugs prevented their departure. In March 1944, the authorities took

’For a description of medical atrocities at the death camp, see Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (New York, 1960). 250 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

the family, along with the other Jews in the region, to a relocation center where they interrogated heads of families in an effort to locate their gold, silver, or jewelry. Two months later the authorities forced the Mozes, along with thousands of other Jews, onto packed cattle train cars for a four-day journey, without food and with almost no water, into Poland. Their ar- rival at Auschwitz at the end of this horrendous ordeal marked the last time all of the family members saw each other.’O After disembarking from the railroad car, Eva, Miriam, and their mother became separated from their father and sisters who, they believed, were killed that day. Jaffa Mozes and her girls were standing on the plat- form when Nazi soldiers ran by calling for twins. When Jaffa confirmed her girls’ relationship, Mengele’s men took them for his experiments. As they were led from the “selection”platform, Eva and her twin sister looked back at their mother’s outstretched arms. It was the last time they would ever see her. Camp guards tattooed Eva’s left arm with the designation “A- 7063.” She recalls walking to the end of the crowded barracks to use the latrine that night and discovering the corpses of three emaciated children lying on the floor.” In the weeks and months that followed, Mengele performed experi- ments on Eva and Miriam. His assistants tied Eva to an examining table and inoculated her with unknown strains of bacteria or viruses in order to observe her body’s reaction and to compare it to that of her “healthy” sister. Eva realized that if she died, her sister would lose her value to the doctor and thus his reason to keep Miriam alive. Eva became ill with swol- len arms and legs and high fever, but through a combination of willpower, the help of other prisoners (who found potatoes for her to eat), and luck, she fought off the illness. Later, Miriam also received injections of un- known material, the source, she later believed, of her eventual kidney failure.I2 Their only resource during this dreadful time was hope, which Eva considers to have been essential. Each girl knew that her sister re- mained alive, and they could hear sounds of nearby American bombing raids, indicating that the war was still going Soviet troops liberated the camps in January 1945.

loEva Mozes Kor, Echoesfrom Auschwitz: Dr MengeleS Twins, The Story of Eva and Miriam Mozes as told to Mary Wright (Terre Haute, Ind., 1995), 51,58-59,63-64. “lbid., 71-73,87,95. ‘?bid., 106-107, 110, 118. Eva donated one of her kidneys so that her sister could live without dialysis. 131bid.,88, 124-25. THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 251

Twins Eva and Miriam Mozes, age eleven, upon their liberation from Auschwitz by Soviet army troops on January 27, 1945. Courtesy Auschwitz Liberation Film

The troops sent the Mozes girls with other children to an orphanage in a convent at . During a visit to a refugee camp, they found a mother of twins, a Mrs. Csengheri who also had been at Auschwitz- Birkenau and whose children also had survived. Eva and Miriam con- vinced her to say she was their aunt and to take them with her. They hoped to get back to their home. The group traveled by train first to relocation centers in Byelorussia and then back to Transylvania, where the twins found out that their par- ents and sisters had not returned. An aunt who lived in a nearby city took them in. They began their education in communist-controlled Rumania, where their knowledge of the West was largely confined to propaganda about the “evils” of United States “imperialism.” In 1950, having become disillusioned with yet another totalitarian government, they were able to immigrate with their aunt to 1~rael.l~

141bid.,167-70, 175-78. 252 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

It was there, a decade later, that Eva, by then a sergeant major in the Israeli army, met Michael Kor, a Latvian-born Jew who as a child had survived internment at Buchenwald. With the assistance of one of the American soldiers who liberated his camp, Kor had immigrated to Terre Haute, where a local family raised him. He graduated from high school and received a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy at Purdue University. While he was vacationing in Israel in 1960, Michael and Eva met, fell in love, and were married. He returned to Terre Haute, and two months later his new bride followed to make their home.15 Miriam remained in Israel, where Eva visited her each year until her death in 1993.16 Eva’s first decade in Terre Haute was a relatively tranquil, domestic period; she and Michael concentrated on raising their two children, Alex and Rina. Her identity as a “camp survivor,” she soon discovered, was something her neighbors found curious, perhaps even incomprehensible. They would stare, and when she vigorously protested Halloween tricks such as soaping the Kor house windows or throwing handfuls of corn on their porch, the neighbors shunned her, calling her “that crazy lady.” Michael and the children told Eva to ignore the taunts. Her reactions, they said, simply encouraged more. But Eva never c0u1d.l~ After the 1979 broadcast of the NBC television miniseries Holocaust, Eva sensed a beginning of awareness in the Terre Haute community of what had happened to the European Jews.’’ In 1982, she sponsored a gathering of midwestern Holocaust survivors at a local motel, an event that provided many of them with their first opportunity to meet and find mutual support. Eva contacted me through the history department at Rose- Hulman and we conducted an audiotaped interview which she then do- nated to the Indiana State University Librarylg Two years later, in 1984, she decided to form an organization called CANDLES dedicated to bring- ing together other surviving twins and locating Mengele’s medical records. It was possible, she thought, that the records might contain information

15Eva Kor, interview of March 20, 2004, Kor Oral History, March 20, 2004 (Rose-Hulman Oral History Archive, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Terre Haute, Indiana), hereafter referred to as Eva Kor March 2004 interview; Mary Wright, telephone conversation with author, April 8, 2004. 16Kor,Echoes from Auschwitz, dedication page. “Eva Kor March 2004 interview. I8Ibid.;Wright telephone conversation. lgEva Kor and Holocaust survivors, interviews by William B. Pickett, 1982 (Cunningham Memo- rial Library, Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana). THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 253

about the experiments and thus ways of countering their long-term health effects. She also began to receive invitations to talk about her experiences at Auschwitz-Birkenau from local civic groups, as well as school and col- lege classes. One such invitation came from high school English teacher Mary Wright, who asked Eva to speak to her senior class in Fithian, Illinois. The students had read Nyiszli’s Auschwita: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account and were familiar with the experiments on twins. Wright recalls that the experience of meeting and listening to Eva was unforgettable for her stu- dentsz0 After visiting both Auschwitz and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memo- rial in Israel in the summer of 1993, Wright urged Eva to write an autobi- ography and even offered to help her with it.z1They published the book, Echoes from Auschwita, in 1995. Meanwhile, Eva opened a small Holo- caust museum on South Third Street where travelers on Indiana 63LJ.S. 41, the main route between Chicago and Evansville, could easily see it. To identify the museum, Eva and Mary erected a modest, lighted commercial sign on a pole. The CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center was an open classroom with tables displaying objects and photographs depicting life in the death camps. Eva says her goal in founding the museum was to teach children not to single out others. Such actions, she affirms, can lead to discrimination or worse. Mary, for her part, helped Eva to envision and undertake an even larger, educational mission.zzStudents sat in the fold- ing chairs in the center of the room. Mary would give the introduction on the rise of anti-Semitism and the Nazi party in the 1920s and 1930s. Eva would tell of her experiences. Linda Lambert, an English teacher at Terre Haute North High School, was the first teacher in the area to assign stu- dents to read about the Holocaust and to write essays which they entered in an annual contest sponsored by CANDLES. Despite the lack of a state mandate or budgetary provisions, other teachers from Terre Haute grade,

20MaryWright, e-mail to the author, April 27,2004; Wright telephone conversation. ”Wright telephone conversation. 22“Puttinga Price on Holocaust Survivors’ Hopes,” New York Times, March 13, 2004, 815. As Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky of the Lubavitch Hasidic movement in Brooklyn has said, “The greatest revenge the victims could have on those who persecuted and slaughtered them would be in the perpetuity of the Jewisheducation and, therefore, Jewishlife.” But it is important to note, as well, that among the groups that Hitler and his henchmen attempted tm exterminate were disabled persons, gypsies, homosexuals,Jehovah‘s Witnesses, and people of Slavic ethnicity 254 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

middle, and high schools soon began to bring their classes to the mu- seum. Each year attendance, which included students from Illinois, grew larger until during 2002 alone some 2,300 persons visited the museum.23 Eva estimates a total of more than 40,000 visitors to the museum in the eight-and-a-half years of its existence.24 Despite Mary’s help and the growing interest of teachers and stu- dents, Eva felt that the museum remained isolated from the mainstream of Terre Haute’s cultural life. Modest royalties from sales of Eva’s book as well as donations (including funds provided by a school in Illinois in which children collected pull tabs from soft drink cans, and by students at Terre Haute North who raised $10,000 by collecting one million pen- nies) helped defray expenses but were never adequate.25 What, then, caused such an outpouring of support for Eva after the fire? In part, it was the traditional rallylng of an American community to help a fellow member: compassion, charity, and brotherly love combined with a feeling of “there but for the grace of God go I.” There was another factor, however. Just three years earlier, the fed- eral penitentiary at Terre Haute had become the location of a new death chamber. It was there in June 2001 that federal authorities, for the first time in thirty years, resumed the death sentence, executing Timothy McVeigh, the convicted bomber of the Murrah Federal Building in Okla- homa City, by lethal injection. A veteran of the 1991 Gulf War, McVeigh had been an excellent sol- dier, but he apparently became disillusioned when he failed to qualify for the elite Special Forces. After his discharge he drifted and began reading white-supremacist, anti-government literature. He became obsessed with alleged FBI misdeeds such as the incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the assault on David Koreshs Branch Davidian religious compound at Waco, Texas. The McVeigh execution was a media event with international televi- sion news and camera crews camped for a week near the prison grounds. The city established special routes and parking lots; buses carried the crowds to and from the prison. Debates between proponents and oppo- nents of the death penalty made headlines in USA Today, the New York

23Wrighttelephone conversation;Linda Lambert, telephone conversationwith the author, April 24, 2004. “Eva Kor March 2004 interview. 25Wrighttelephone conversation;Lambert telephone conversation. THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 255

Eva and her husband, Michael, like her a concentration camp survivor, were honored by Governor Joe Kernan at his state-of-the-state address on January 13,2004. Photo by Mary Wright

Times, and around the world. On the day of the execution, to the dismay of many local groups, world attention was fixed on Terre Haute.26By scrawl- ing the words “Remember Timmy McVeigh,” the museum arsonist may have been making a political statement or may simply have been trymg to exorcise some internal demon. What is clear is that two years prior to the fire the people of Terre Haute had become conscious of themselves as actors on a moral stage, and any reference to McVeigh brought back the mixed memories of the earlier event. In the years leading up to the fire, the citizens of Terre Haute (and Americans generally) had become aware of the Nazi Holocaust as never

26“AsMcVeighs Execution Nears, Frenzy Envelops Indiana Town,” USA Today, March 19, 2001, A01; “McVeigh Marks Towns at Both Ends of His Life, Hometown Eager to Let Fame Pass,” ibid., June 12,2001, AO2. 256 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY

before. Millions had seen the stirring episode about the Fascist and Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews in the television adaptation of Herman Wouks War and Remembrance. Steven Spielberg's film, Schindler'sList, dra- matized the stratagems of a self-centered German entrepreneur, Oskar Schindler, to save Polish-Jewish work-camp inmates from extermination by the Nazis. It won the Academy Award for best picture. Band ofBrothers, a popular mini-series on HBO, featured heart-wrenching scenes of the liberation of Landsberg concentration camp in Austria. Yet another Acad- emy Award-winning movie, The Pianist, portrayed the poignant efforts of a celebrated Jewish musician to hide from the Nazis in wartime-Warsaw. An act of Congress had authorized the construction of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which opened in Washington, D.C., in 1994.27 From newspaper articles and television news, Americans learned about movements to provide reparations to victims of historic wrongs, the most successful of which was the 1998 class-action settlement in which Swiss banks paid $1.25 billion to European Jewry for their handling of and profiting from secret Nazi accounts containing gold stolen from Jews during the Holocaust. Edward R. Korman, chief judge of the U.S. district court in Brooklyn, New York, solicited applications for $400 million of settlement funds. Among the many applicants was one of Kor's fellow survivors of Mengele's experiments, Irene Hizme, 66, of Long Island, New York. By the time of the settlement Irene was confined to a wheelchair from ailments that she traced back to the death camp. Eva, whose father's assets were mainly in land rather than gold, nevertheless was a part of this suit and received a settlement of $1,000. She also received $4,700 from a settlement reached with the Corporation (the German, not the American entity) for using Jews as slave laborers during the war.28 By 2003, the people of Terre Haute shared a consciousness as never before of the wages of hate. They had seen televised scenes of genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. The Islamic extremist hijackers who flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, had demonstrated what ideological hatred can lead to. Responding

27Seethe Holocaust Museum's website at http://www.ushmm.org 28"Puttinga Price on Holocaust Survivors' Hopes," New York Times, March 13, 2004, 815; Eva Kor, e-mail to author,June 20,2004. Besides Jews, the claimants included Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses. THE TERRE HAUTE HOLOCAUST MUSEUM 257

to the destruction of the CANDLES museum was, they realized, a way to speak out against such violence and inhumanityz9 No doubt the most important reason for the public response, how- ever, was Eva herself: her dedication as a witness, a storyteller, and an educator. The fire brought out in her an admirable grace, true to her mes- sage of peace and forgiveness. When the television reporters at the scene asked for her reaction, she replied, “Well, I have had better days.” After a slight pause, she added, “I have had worse ones, In the days and weeks that followed, she reached a national audience. “I am,” she said, “an eternal optimist. I do this because what I do in my little corner of the world might make a differen~e.”~~ On January 13, 2004, Indiana Governor Joe Kernan asked Eva and her husband to sit in a place of honor at the state capitol during his an- nual state-of-the-state address. Three days later, Eva received the “spirit of justice” award from the Indiana Civil Rights Commi~sion.~~For Eva, now seventy years old, her struggle from an unlikely setting of a small city in southwestern Indiana to tell the story of the Holocaust continues, but now, as never before, she has help. Her message of memory’s precious place in civilized societies has spread across her state and around the

29Larnberttelephone conversation. 3oEvaKor March 2004 interview. ”‘‘Ko~Honored at State Ceremony,” Terre Haut‘e Tribune Star, January 27, 2004. 321bid. 33Kortelephone conversation.