A Woman to Know: Gisella Perl
I treated patients with my voice, telling them beautiful stories, telling them that one day they would have birthdays again, one day we would sing again. — Gisella
(photo by Yale Gerber)
Gisella Perl was a Jewish doctor in Auschwitz. When Nazi doctor Josef Mengele began recruiting pregnant women in the camps for experiments and vivisections, Gisella took action: she performed thousands of secret abortions for other imprisoned Jewish women, saving hundred of lives in the course of her three years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. "No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies," she told The New York Times in 1982. "But if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered."
She survived Auschwitz and was remembered by other survivors as a guardian angel. When she immigrated to the United States after the war, Eleanor Roosevelt asked her to return to medicine. She worked as a gynecologist at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital until her death in 1988. Throughout her life, she balanced her work as an infertility specialist with a rigorous touring and speaking schedule, sharing her story from Aushcwitz with audiences around the world.
"I didn't want to be a doctor," Gisella said she told Eleanor Roosevelt. "I wanted to be a witness."
Add to your reading list:
I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (Gisella Perl)
Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust (Sonja M. Hedgepeth)
Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor's True Story of Auschwitz (Olga Lengyel)
Read more:
Out of Death, a Zest for Life (The New York Times)
Meet the Auschwitz Abortionist Who Saved Countless Lives During the Holocaust (Jezebel)
"No one will ever know": The Holocaust and 'privileged' Jews (Adam Brown)
Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (Roger S. Gottlieb)
The Greatest crime in Auschwitz was to be Pregnant (Elizabeth Burger)
The true story of the woman who performed mercy abortions at Auschwitz (Boing Boing)
Watch more:
Out of the Ashes (Joseph Sargent)
*~Thank you to Jess Stahl for recommending Gisella as a woman to know! All Jess's email said was "this lady." And she was right, right?~*
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