![]() There were even special barracks devoted to rape. Additionally, women often became pregnant due to sexual exchange for essential commodities and due to the sexual violence they experienced at the hands of SS soldiers. The Nazi regime explicitly targeted Jewish reproduction, and therefore Jewish women, during its efforts to create a master race. “The greatest crime in Auschwitz was to be pregnant,” Gisella would later reflect. ![]() Although he spoke of a better camp with more bread and milk rations for the pregnant women, Gisella soon learned the ugly truth she witnessed a group of pregnant women being beaten with clubs, attacked by dogs, and thrown into the crematorium alive. When he learned Gisella was a trained gynecologist, Mengele tasked her with reporting every pregnant woman to him. His job was to provide a scientific basis for the Nazis’ subscription to eugenics, and he needed help.Īs Mengele examined the newcomers, he cherry-picked those with medical expertise. At Auschwitz, devoid of ethical limitations, Mengele had the agency to execute inhumane and unthinkable medical experiments. Patrolling the influx of Hungarian Jews that day was Auschwitz’s head “doctor” and the so-called “Angel of Death,” Josef Mengele. Emerging from a windowless cattle car, amid billowing gray clouds, Gisella was immediately torn away from her family. She and her family were corralled into the Sighet Ghetto and later sent to Auschwitz. Right after Gisella’s return to Hungary, Nazi forces invaded her hometown. Oppressive new laws ousted Jewish doctors from universities, practices, and government jobs. When the Nazi Party overpowered the republic, Gisella’s career began tearing at the seams. Gisella attended medical school in Berlin, where many Jewish physicians were licensed during the Weimar Republic. She reassured him: “Wherever life will take me, under whatever circumstances, I shall always remain a good, true Jew.” He worried a medical career would cause her to stray from Judaism. There, she realized she had a budding passion for medicine when she informed her father, however, he rejected the idea. At sixteen, she became the only woman and the only Jew to graduate from her high school. From a young age, it was evident that Gisella was gifted. She and her six siblings studied Torah every day and filled their home with joyous singing on Shabbat. As modern Jewish feminists, neither can we.īorn in nineteenth-century Sighet, Gisella came of age in an observant Jewish household. Imprisoned and dehumanized, Gisella never quivered in the face of a wicked establishment, never turned her back to the feminist cause. Yet her heroic story can serve as a lesson for all of us in our struggle for equal healthcare access, especially today. Gisella’s story has long been unsung, swept under the rug in women’s rights movements and historical archives alike. I see a future in which we all feel the proud approval of transformative activist foremothers, foremothers like Holocaust survivor and doctor Gisella Perl. After decades out of print, this new edition will ensure the crucial place of Perl’s testimony on Holocaust memory and education.When I see crowds in the streets demonstrating, I see a future in which our ardent calls against a system that strips us of our reproductive rights compound into institutional amendments. These efforts including infanticide and abortion, topics that would remain silenced for decades and, unfortunately, continue to be marginalized from all too many Holocaust accounts. Josef Mengele in his infamous so-called clinic and using her position to save the lives of other women prisoners. One of the memoir’s major historical contributions is Perl’s account of being forced to work alongside Dr. ![]() 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. Gisella Perl’s memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women’s extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. ![]()
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