![]() ![]() Unlike many important Holocaust memoirs, Perl's writing is both graphic in its horrific detail and eloquent in its emotional responses. Perl's memoir is also significant for its inclusion of the Nazis' Roma victims as well as in-depth representations of Nazi women guards and other personnel. It is also the first memoir by a woman Holocaust survivor and establishes the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous. Perl accomplished this by representing her life before imprisonment, in Auschwitz and other camps, and in the struggle to remake her life. With writing as powerful as that of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, her story individualizes and therefore humanizes a victim of mass dehumanization. See the essay on I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz.Gisella Perl's memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women's extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. She spent her final years as a volunteer consultant in gynecology to Shaare Zedek Hospital. In 1979 she moved to Jerusalem, fulfilling a vow she had made to her father as the family was being deported to Auschwitz. She opened a practice in New York City, where she became an expert in the treatment of infertility and delivered 3,000 babies, many to women for whom she had cared in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The following year, in which I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz was published, she was granted citizenship by a special act of Congress. Perl came to the United States in 1947 as an "Ambassador of the Six Million," as she called herself, speaking to physicians and nurses about her experiences. She was pulled back from the brink only by the loving care of a young Catholic priest whose compassion and kindness served as the antidote for the poison she had taken.ĭr. Overwhelmed by despair, Perl sought to end her life. In yet another cruel twist, liberation brought Perl to new depths of suffering, for it was only then that she learned that her husband and son, along with her parents, had perished. It is a world of unfathomable cruelty and extraordinary compassion, a world where Perl and her nine women colleagues at Birkenau, doctors and nurses, band together as sisters, committed to one another and to the more than 30,000 women within their care.Īs the Russians drew close to Auschwitz, Josef Mengele, the camp physician, tore Perl away from her "camp sisters." She was sent first to Berlin, then to a labor camp near Hamburg, and lastly to Bergen-Belsen, where she survived in the midst of mountains of corpses until she was liberated by the British army in April 1945. Perl describes a world gone mad, where she feels compelled secretly to kill newborn babies in order to save the lives of their mothers, for if a pregnancy were discovered, both mother and child would be killed. It is a world where trying to maintain a semblance of human decency-cutting off a piece of cloth from the camp uniform to cleanse oneself from the latrine-is considered a crime. In a series of interlocking episodes, Perl describes a world where three uncooked potatoes are worth a bag of diamonds where a piece of string to tie one's shoes can mean the difference between life and death and where telling a Nazi guard that one is pregnant is a death sentence. Perl wrote only one book about her Holocaust experiences, but in this single small work she created an unforgettable portrait of women's suffering and courage. The book also recounts Perl's struggle to survive after she was taken from Birkenau, finally arriving at that most horrible of destinations, Bergen-Belsen, where the Nazis dumped thousands with neither food nor shelter. Most of the memoir focuses upon Perl's time as camp gynecologist in Birkenau. Perl recorded her experiences in a brief memoir, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz (1948). Her daughter, Gabriella, was hidden by non-Jews and survived the war. Forced from their home, Perl, her parents, husband, and son were sent first to the ghetto and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau. All of that changed when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. As wife, mother, and physician, Perl enjoyed a successful and rewarding life. With her surgeon husband, she operated a hospital in Sighet, Gisella Perl was trained as a gynecologist and obstetrician. ![]() Volunteer consultant in gynecology, Shaare Zedek Hospital, Jerusalem, beginning in 1979. Prisoner and camp physician, Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944-45 prisoner, Bergen-Belsen, 1945. ![]() Career: Gynecologist and director of hospital, Sighet, Hungary (now Romania). ![]() Family: Married (died) one son (deceased) and one daughter. Nationality: American (originally Romanian: immigrated to the United States, 1947, granted U.S. ![]()
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