Eva Kor and her twin sister survived the medical experiments carried out by Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele. Photo: CANDLES Museum.

A Jewish woman who survived the inhuman experiments carried out on children by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz extermination camp died on Friday at the age of 85.

Eva Mozes Kor had been visiting the Polish city of Krakow for an annual educational trip with the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana, that she founded. Kor had experienced a tough year health-wise, having suffered from respiratory problems and undergoing heart surgery, and was already dead when she was found in her hotel room in the morning.

Kor was a Jewish native of Romania who was sent in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where most of her family was killed. She and her twin sister survived, but were subjected to the terrifying medical experiments of Mengele, who was known as the “Angel of Death.”

Both survived and, as documented by the Soviet liberators of Auschwitz, led the famous procession of children in a freedom march out of the camp on January 27, 1945. After the war they made aliyah to Israel, where Eva, then an army officer, met and married fellow Holocaust survivor Michael Kor. They settled in rural Terre Haute, Indiana, where Eva and her sister Miriam Mozes Zieger founded the CANDLES organization in 1995.

Some 200 individual twins survived Mengele’s experiments and, in 1985, 122 of them reunited at Auschwitz, 40 years after their liberation.

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) called her a “giant” and a “friend” in a statement to The Indianapolis Star.

“Everywhere she went, Eva brought light into darkness and provided comfort to those in pain unlike anyone we’ve ever met,” Holcomb said. “Her angelic spirit will live on in the countless souls she saved from ongoing confusion and torment.”