What Eva Mozes Kor taught me about forgiveness, memory, and the limits of attention

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist |Educator

In November 2025, the United States Mint pressed its final pennies. For years, the coin cost more to manufacture than it was worth, and most of us had long since stopped bending down for one on the sidewalk. Pennies collect in jars, car cup holders, and the little dishes beside cash registers, the only coin that ever needed its own charity system because nobody wanted to carry it. Yet, held close enough to the eye, a penny can block out the entire visible world.

I learned this from Eva Mozes Kor, who survived Josef Mengele’s experiments on twins at Auschwitz and spent the latter part of her life teaching people to forgive. I traveled with Eva for four years, and I have written elsewhere about the day she taught me this lesson in a place where its meaning was almost unbearably concrete. But I want to return to the lesson itself, because the longer I live with it, the more remarkable I find its simplicity. Eva had a way of making enormous moral questions small enough to hold in your hand, and this particular question required only one cent.

The exercise took about a minute. Eva fished a penny from her purse, handed it over, and told you to hold it very close to one eye while closing the other. Then she would ask what you could see.

You could see the penny, of course. Abraham Lincoln in profile, the word Liberty, the year it was minted. But that was all. She would point toward the sky and ask whether you could see it. You couldn’t. She would ask about the person standing in front of you. Again, nothing but the penny. Then she would ask something that seemed almost comically unrelated to the exercise: Could you see yourself? Could you look in the mirror and notice that your hair looked nice today?

You couldn’t do that, either. For the moment, Abraham Lincoln had more of your attention than you did.

“Make that penny the worst thing that ever happened to you,” she would say. Then, with the same directness she’d used for every other instruction: “Drop the penny.”

The Narrowing

Eva was not a psychologist, but her exercise illustrates something psychologists have been studying for decades: the remarkable power of distress to narrow human attention.

In 1959, the psychologist J. A. Easterbrook proposed that heightened emotional arousal restricts the range of information a person can process. Under threat, attention focuses on what seems most urgent, often at the expense of everything else. Later research on eyewitness memory demonstrated a related phenomenon known as weapon focus, in which someone confronted with a gun may remember the weapon vividly while struggling to recall the person holding it. The mind selects what it believes matters most, and the rest of the scene recedes.

There are good reasons for this. When danger is immediate, focusing on a threat can be useful. The difficulty comes when the threat has passed, but the mind continues to behave as though it were still present.

The late psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema devoted much of her career to studying rumination, the repetitive return to distressing experiences and the questions surrounding them. Her research linked persistent rumination with more severe and prolonged depression. Rumination is so exhausting because it can resemble productive thought. A person may believe that another hour of examination will finally explain what happened, why it happened, or how it might have been prevented. Sometimes the search for understanding produces genuine insight. But repetition can also become its own enclosure, keeping a painful experience at the center of consciousness long after the original events have ended.

That is what the penny feels like from the inside. It does not announce itself as an obstruction. It presents itself as the most important thing in the world, and everything beyond it becomes less vivid by comparison. A conversation with a friend may be pleasant, but some portion of the mind remains elsewhere. Beauty is still recognizable, although it no longer seems quite as absorbing. The ordinary pleasures of being alive begin to feel strangely remote because the injury has become the measure against which every other experience must compete.

And here is the arrangement’s peculiar cruelty: the penny has not actually grown larger. The sky has not disappeared, nor has the person standing in front of you. What has changed is the position of one small thing in relation to everything else.

Eva’s instruction was to move it.

Why She Didn’t Say “Throw It Away”

Another part of the exercise mattered to Eva just as much as lowering the coin. Once you removed it from your eye, she would explain why she chose her words so carefully.

“Notice I didn’t say, ‘throw the penny away.’ It isn’t trash. It is worth something. It belongs to you.”

This is where her teaching becomes most interesting, because it makes an important distinction between remembering an injury and remaining captive to it.

Popular advice about painful experiences often encourages people to let go, move on, or put the past behind them, as though healing requires some final act of disposal. Eva’s understanding was considerably more demanding. She never forgot Auschwitz, and she never asked anyone else to forget it. She established a museum and devoted decades to Holocaust education because she believed the events she survived must remain part of the world’s historical memory. Her published definition of forgiveness explicitly distinguished forgiveness from forgetting.

What she challenged was the position the memory occupied.

Held against the eye, a painful experience governs everything you see. Lowered into the palm of your hand, that same experience becomes something you can examine without surrendering your entire field of vision to it. You can remember it, speak about it, and insist that others understand what happened. You can carry it into a classroom or preserve it in a museum. The memory remains important, but it no longer needs to obscure everything else.

Eva was particularly impatient with the sentimental suggestion that suffering must have happened for some beneficial reason. She dismissed that idea as the “cotton candy” of “everything happens for a reason.” Nothing about the murder of her family or the experiments she endured needed to be justified by what she eventually accomplished. The value she found in her experiences came from what she chose to do with their memory, not from any inherent goodness in the suffering itself.

Psychological research offers an interesting parallel. In his work on the inner voice, psychologist Ethan Kross has explored how people can reflect on distressing experiences from a more distanced perspective. Studies of this kind suggest that changing the vantage point from which we consider an event can reduce emotional distress without requiring us to suppress the memory. The event remains part of our history, but we are no longer confined to experiencing it from precisely the same psychological position.

Eva accomplished something similar with a penny. She offered people a physical demonstration of the difference between possessing a memory and being possessed by it.

The Decision

“You can’t drop the penny,” Eva said, “until you decide you don’t want to focus on it any longer. It has to be your choice, your decision. And the way to drop your penny is to forgive.”

Many readers may resist the lesson of forgiveness, and understandably so. The word has too often been used to hurry injured people toward a peace that primarily benefits those who injured them. Forgiveness can be presented as an obligation, with the person who suffered expected to prove moral maturity by setting aside anger before the injury has even been acknowledged.

Eva’s understanding of forgiveness was different. She separated it so completely from the perpetrator’s behavior that neither repentance nor reconciliation was necessary. The offender didn’t have to apologize, become a better person, or even stay alive. Forgiveness was a decision made by the person who had suffered, concerning the place that suffering would continue to occupy in that person’s life.

“Forgiveness is as personal as chemotherapy,” she told The Forgiveness Project. “I do it for myself.”

She regarded forgiveness as a kind of medicine, something she could administer without asking permission from the people who had harmed her. This was especially consequential in her own case, because most of those people were dead, and none could undo what had happened.

The research on forgiveness offers some support for Eva’s intuition. In a 2001 study, psychologist Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet and her colleagues asked participants to recall someone who had hurt them and imagine responding with either resentment or forgiveness. During the unforgiving imagery, participants experienced greater negative emotion and showed heightened physiological responses, including increased heart rate and blood pressure, while forgiving imagery produced comparatively calmer responses. The study doesn’t show that forgiveness cures anything, but it does suggest that the way we revisit an injury shapes how our bodies respond to it now.

Eva understood that from experience. She once told me that she had wanted to kill every Nazi, and she laughed as she recalled the intensity of her anger. But the anger had endured long after the war, becoming something she carried into an entirely different life.

“But my anger made me sick,” she told me. “So bitter.”

She had survived the people who wanted her dead, yet their actions continued to occupy her thoughts. Forgiveness became the means by which she could reclaim some of the life she had spent thinking about them.

There is something extraordinarily defiant about that choice. Eva had no power to change what happened to her at Auschwitz, and she knew perfectly well that forgiveness would not change the historical record. But she could decide whether the people who had taken so much from her would continue to determine how she experienced the years they had failed to take.

Waves

The penny exercise’s apparent simplicity conceals one complication. It makes an enormous psychological undertaking look like a single hand movement. Raise the penny, lower the penny, and the world comes back into view. Eva knew that healing was rarely so orderly.

“Forgiveness is a moment in time,” she liked to say. “Healing is a process.”

This distinction is one of the most generous parts of her teaching. A decision can be sincere without immediately transforming the habits of the mind. Someone may genuinely wish to stop rehearsing an injury and still find themselves returning to it, sometimes with an intensity that seems to contradict everything they believed they had resolved.

The mind remembers its familiar paths. A particular song comes on, an anniversary passes, or a name appears unexpectedly on a screen, and the penny is suddenly back in front of the eye. The old questions return with their old urgency, even when those questions have been examined many times before. The habit of lifting the coin was formed for a reason, and it does not disappear simply because a person has decided to put it down.

Eva described the return of deep offenses as something that happened “like waves in the ocean.” Forgiveness, in her understanding, sometimes had to be repeated as often as the memory returned.

This is the part of the lesson I think about most often, because it changes the meaning of those difficult moments when an old injury unexpectedly returns to the center of your attention. The return of pain does not necessarily invalidate an earlier decision to forgive, just as the return of grief does not mean a person has made no progress in mourning. Healing is not measured by the permanent absence of difficult memories.

Some days the penny seems almost weightless; others, it feels as large as the world. The work is to recognize what has happened to the field of vision and to remember that the hand can be lowered again. With time, a person may become quicker to notice the movement, less inclined to mistake the return of the memory for an obligation to follow it all the way back into the past.

The penny may always be there. But it need not always be held against the eye.

Rich

Eva had one final line, which she saved until the exercise had become sufficiently solemn. After explaining forgiveness and the importance of lowering the penny, she would ask whether you knew what else you were, now that you were holding that coin.

You never knew quite what answer she wanted.

“Rich!”

It was a terrible joke, wonderfully timed and perfectly characteristic of a woman who could move from Auschwitz to a punch line without losing sight of either’s gravity.

But I have come to think that it was also the deepest part of the exercise.

The worst thing that happened to you becomes part of your history, an inheritance you never asked to receive. You have no obligation to find something beautiful in it, and certainly no reason to be grateful for the suffering itself. But memory can take on a different kind of value when the person who carries it gains the freedom to decide what to do with it. An experience that once seemed capable of swallowing an entire life may eventually become something you can speak about, examine, or offer to another person who needs to know survival is possible.

Eva spent much of her life doing precisely that. She built a museum and spoke to generations of students, carrying Auschwitz’s memory into places where its lessons might outlive her. Her forgiveness did not diminish the crimes committed against her. She remained an uncompromising witness, even as she insisted the people responsible would not be permitted to occupy the rest of her life.

The country has stopped making pennies, but billions remain scattered in drawers, coat pockets, and the bottoms of purses. The next time one turns up, it might be worth holding it to your eye for a moment, just to remember how much of the world one nearly worthless coin can hide.

Then lower your hand, and look at what was there the whole time.

Read more about my years with Eva at the Eva Mozes Kor Project.

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Sources

Dale, M. (2025, November 12). US Mint in Philadelphia presses final pennies as the 1-cent coin gets canceled. Associated Press.

CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. (n.d.). Eva’s definition of forgiveness.

Easterbrook, J. A. (1959). The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior. Psychological Review, 66(3), 183–201.

Kross, E. (2021). Chatter: The voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it. Crown.

Loftus, E. F., Loftus, G. R., & Messo, J. (1987). Some facts about “weapon focus.” Law and Human Behavior, 11(1), 55–62.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2000). The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109(3), 504–511.

The Forgiveness Project. (n.d.). Eva Kor.

Witvliet, C. V. O., Ludwig, T. E., & Vander Laan, K. L. (2001). Granting forgiveness or harboring grudges: Implications for emotion, physiology, and health. Psychological Science, 12(2), 117–123.