What is forgiveness to you?

Yesterday I watched a documentary called “Forgiving Dr. Mengele“.  The documentary followed a victim/twin of the Holocaust by the name of Eva Mozes Kor and her decision to forgive the Nazis who killed her family and in particular Dr. Mengele and his staff who experimented on her and her twin along with approximately 1,400 other sets of twins.  They were separated from their family as soon as they were off the cattle cars.  The sets of twins were taken and experiments started.  They were injected with mysterious concoctions that some think were strains of lethal bacteria, injected in their eyes to see if the eye color would change, surgeries were performed with no anesthesia, twins were sewn by skin, blood vessels and organs to make siamese twins along with so many other horrendous experiments .  Still to this day no one knows what Dr. Mengele injected the children with..no records have ever been found and he left after the liberation to live in hiding.  At one point Eva Kor was given 2 weeks to live due to whatever it was she was injected with but she refused to die, she refused to leave her sister knowing that once she was gone there was no hope left for her twin.  They would kill her too so they could compare the autopsies.  Her twin was injected with something that stopped the growth of her kidneys.  They never finished developing and she died later in life due to complications and never knowing what she was injected with.  You can learn more about Eva and her sister Miriam  here.

The documentary’s main focus was Eva Kor’s forgiveness towards the Nazis, Germans and Dr. Mengele after 50 years and everything that was done to her and the other twins.  Other Holocaust twin survivors do not agree with her decision of forgiveness.  Eva Kor’s thinking of forgiveness is that if she forgives them for what they have done she can move on with her life closing that chapter.  It is a step for her in self-healing from her horrendous past.  Her way of not being locked in as a victim anymore, her forgiveness is her freedom. Not forgetting, never forgetting but simply forgiving to move on.  You can’t walk around with hate in your heart, revenge serves no good, you must forgive in order to move on, to be free.  The surviving twins disagree with her way of thinking, for one because they think she is forgetting and an example was given saying: when a parent forgives their child for something they did wrong it is usually never spoken of again.  There have been a few that agree and even more that disagree with Eva and her forgiveness towards the Nazis and Dr. Mengele.  She stands hard on her view of forgiveness and has written books and has spoken at over 400 schools, colleges etc. regarding her forgiveness.

My question to you is what is forgiveness to you?  Could you forgive someone for something that they had done to you?  Could you forgive and not forget?  Would you be able to find forgiveness in your heart or would you harbor that hate and never forgive?

Forgiveness is different to everyone.  What is your thought on forgiveness?