Dr. Alex Kor is full of stories. The son of two Holocaust survivors, he has built a successful career as a podiatrist — including a stint treating the University of Evansville men’s basketball team — and met inspiring people along the way.
He shares some of those stories Oct. 25 during a free 10:30 a.m. presentation at the Evansville Wartime Museum, which along with the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, Indiana, is paying tribute to Kor’s late father, Mickey, who died on Oct. 19, 2021.
During his presentation, “I’ll retrace his history and what happened before, during, and after the war,” Alex says. “My dad was very lucky to survive. He was on a death march, and I will chronicle that.”
Oct. 24 would have been Mickey’s 100th birthday. Evansville’s public celebration stretches throughout Oct. 25 and includes lunch at The Rooftop, tours of the USS LST-325 and Reitz Home Museum, and a birthday dinner honoring Mickey at Copper House.
CANDLES (Children of Auschwitz Nazi Deadly Lab Experiments Survivors) was founded by Kor’s mother, Eva Mozes Kor, who spoke across the world about her twin sisters’ experiences as well as Eva’s time at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland during World War II. She died on the Fourth of July 2019 during a visit to Poland.
Born in Latvia, Michael “Mickey” Kor survived four years of forced labor in at least three camps during the Holocaust and was liberated in 1945 by Lt. Col. Andrew Nehf in the U.S. Army’s 250th Engineer’s Combat Battalion. Kor followed Nehf back to Terre Haute and, after graduating from Purdue University’s School of Pharmacy in 1952, Mickey served two years as a pharmacist for the U.S. Army in Osaka, Japan. He met Eva in 1960 during a trip to Israel; after they married later that year, the couple settled in Terre Haute to raise son Alex and daughter Rina.
Attending what was then known as Indiana State Teachers College in 1946, Mickey had a gym teacher of note: the legendary John Wooden, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship after Wooden won 10 national championships with University of California, Los Angeles basketball. Mickey loved college hoops and was known for his huge Purdue Boilermakers fandom.
He also loved Coca-Cola for a poignant reason: One of the first gifts he received from the soldiers who liberated him was a bottle of the soft drink. “My dad always thought of Coca-Cola as his champagne,” Alex says.
While Eva became a prominent speaker and activist, many people who knew her husband were not aware he was a Holocaust survivor, according to his son. Mickey’s story “is more of an Indiana story,” Alex says. “He would tell people, ‘I don’t talk about my past,’ but once he started talking, you couldn’t get him to stop.”
Alex’s time as team podiatrist for Purple Aces basketball spanned 1990 to 1995. He currently practices at Hendricks Regional Health in Danville, Indiana, after calling Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Maryland, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, home. He moved back to Indiana to be near his parents, saw his father daily late in his life, and told Mickey that he intended to write a book about their family’s experiences.
Titled “A Blessing, Not a Burden: My Parents’ Remarkable Holocaust Story and My Fight to Keep Their Legacy Alive,” Alex’s book was released in May 2024. It discusses his parents’ past, as well as anti-Semitism the family endured stateside.
Alex says he looks forward to this weekend’s celebration of his father. “It’s a unique opportunity to tell my dad’s story and a little bit of mom’s to Southern Indiana,” he says.
