Billings and its surrounding communities showed their true colors by showing up en masse to honor and hear from a diminutive holocaust survivor Eva Kor, this week in the Billings West High School gymnasium. Her message of forgiveness inspired even the most stoic Montanans assembled together on Tuesday night and moved many to tears.
To a rapt audience, Eva Kor graphically described her experiences as a ten year old twin who, after suffering through a four day trip jammed aboard a cattle car, was forcibly separated from her entire family in a matter of seconds, never to see them again. She soon learned that the Nazis had separated her and her identical twin from the crowd of Jewish detainees in order to make them subjects in the horrific and top secret, “twin medical experiments” conducted under the auspices of Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death”, Dr. Josef Mengele.
Among her many remarkable revelations, Eva Kor described her first day in the camp, including a trip to the latrine, where she discovered the dead bodies of three children, lying abandoned on the filthy latrine floor. She said that in that moment she walked out of the latrine with an extremely clear commitment to “doing everything she could to stay alive”. She said that she immediately had a picture of herself and her sister walking out of the camp, arm in arm, completely free. She believed that this positive vision (mental model) was one of the primary reasons that they indeed survived. She would eventually find a way to forgive her captors and to take her own power back through her decision to forgive. As a result of her lecture, her audience members were challenged and compelled to do their own self-examination.
What about you? What are your mental models? What are you committed to? Most importantly, who do you need to forgive?