When the history of our time comes to be written, a whole chapter – indeed, a whole volume – will have to be devoted to the Holocaust. Not, that is, to the Holocaust itself so much as to what has been made of it in the decades since it happened. It would not be too much to say, I think, that we define ourselves in relation to the Holocaust.

This is, of course, not surprising in those who survived it, or who lost family members, but for some time now there has been a tendency among those who have no connection to the Holocaust to appropriate it as a metaphor, an icon, almost a state religion for the spiritual orientation of those who are otherwise spiritually rootless. On one level, this must be flattering to the remaining survivors, for they naturally become the prophets and martyrs of this new religion. One of them is Eva Mozes Kor, a real estate agent in Terre Haute, Ind., who is the subject of a new film, “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” by Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh. Mrs. Kor is a Romanian Jew who, with her sister Miriam, was one of the young subjects of the twins studies of the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. All the rest of their family was killed.

So I suppose you could say she owed her life to Mengele. After liberation by the Soviets, she and her sister emigrated from Poland to Israel. There, both married. Mrs. Kor returned to Terre Haute with her new husband, who was also a Holocaust survivor, and Miriam stayed on in Israel.

Mrs. Kor became, to all appearances, a normal American housewife of the 1960s. She raised two handsome children and eventually landed a job despite her thick accent. “I survived Auschwitz,” she says of her battle against prejudice.”Do you mean to tell me I cannot sell real estate?” But in 1984 her sister became very ill. As a result of Mengele’s experiments, her kidneys had not developed normally. Mrs. Kor donated one of her own, but her sister was not out of danger. The doctors told her that if she could discover what it was Mengele had injected her with, they would stand a better chance of saving her.

This sent Eva off on a painful journey to Germany to interview Dr. Hans Munch, the only one of Mengele’s associates to have been acquitted of the charge of war crimes at Nuremberg. He was unable to help her, saying Mengele was a dilettante and bungler who didn’t keep proper records and never shared his research with anyone. But Mrs. Kor took a shine to the old man, not least because he confessed to her that he, too, was haunted by his memories of Auschwitz. “The Nazis had nightmares about Auschwitz?” she said to herself incredulously.

It marked a turning point in her life.

She invited Dr. Munch to return with her to Auschwitz for the 40th anniversary of the liberation the following year. This he did, to the obvious discomfort of other former camp inmates who had returned for the same occasion. “It was not tactful of her,” says one of her fellow twin survivors, Jona Laks, who is Mrs. Kor’s nemesis throughout the film.

But Mrs. Kor has obviously never been one to care much about tact. Instead, she sent a letter of thanks to Dr. Munch, in which she also extended to him her personal forgiveness for the crimes committed against her.

This made her feel so good that she said to herself, “Well, Eva, you’re forgiving Dr. Munch. That’s very good. Will you forgive Dr. Mengele?”

And she did! Again, the feeling this produced was unexpectedly gratifying – because, as she said, “I had the power to forgive that little god of Auschwitz.” In other words, it made her no longer the victim but the superior of her now-dead tormenter, and encouraged her to go on to forgive all the Nazis.

The rest of the film follows her as she goes about teaching and lecturing on the power of forgiveness like someone with a new patent remedy at a medicine show. The film is coy about whether or not she profits from her evangelizing, but it implies that any gain is funneled into Mrs. Kor’s own storefront Holocaust museum in Terre Haute.

More generally, the filmmakers are themselves too tactful to look critically at the soupy vocabulary of “healing” and therapeutic self-help that is admittedly stiffened and given substance before audiences of young and yearningly empathetic Americans by Mrs. Kor’s connection to the most personally authenticating event of the last century.

But it is not only Mrs. Laks who expresses doubts about all this in the film. Its most memorable bit comes when Mrs. Kor meets an Israeli peace activist, Dan Bar-On, at a conference in London, and he arranges for her to take her forgiveness tour to Israel. She meets with a group of aggrieved Palestinian Arabs who, without quite saying so, regard her and other Israelis as the Nazis in their own national story.

Suddenly, forgiveness doesn’t seem quite so empowering. Rather the reverse, in fact. Somewhat – but only somewhat – ruefully, Mrs. Kor confesses that “maybe forgiveness cannot happen for people when they are fighting for their lives.”

It is a serious fault in “Forgiving Dr. Mengele,” I think, that it does not make more of this moment as a qualification – to put it tactfully – of the inspiring life story it seeks to tell. But as an account of what must be one of the more memorable meetings between American religiosity and the entrepreneurial spirit, it is still worth seeing.

jbowman@nysun.com