Wikimedia CommonsAfter saving countless pregnant women at Auschwitz, Jewish gynecologist Gisella Perl became one of the first former prisoners to expose the horrors of the Holocaust.Some may know the story of Stanislawa Leszczyska, the midwife at Auschwitz who delivered almost 3,000 babies while imprisoned at the camp. But while Leszczyska delivered infants, another Jewish medical professional likewise risked her life to save others at Auschwitz, albeit in a very different way. Her name was Gisella Perl.Forced to work for the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele at Auschwitz, Perl was asked to report all pregnancies to him knowing that these women would be tortured and killed. So, Gisella Perl realized that in order to save the lives of the women in her care, she could not safely deliver babies like Stanislawa Leszczyska. Instead, Perl performed abortions. This is her story.Gisella Perls Life Before The Horrors Of The HolocaustGisella Perl was born in the small town of Sighet in what was then Hungary on December 10, 1907. Before the Holocaust, Sighet had a large Jewish population. According to a 1910 census, more than one-third of Sighets residents were Jewish, and the streets were filled with dozens of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses. This included Perl and her six siblings, who read the Torah for hours every day, and honored Shabbat every Friday evening.Wikimedia CommonsSighet, the birthplace of Gisella Perl.Perl showed signs of being particularly gifted early in life. She spoke many languages, including Hungarian, Romanian, German, French, and Yiddish. At the age of 16, Perl graduated at the top of her secondary school class, becoming the first woman and the only Jew to have done so.Her father was hesitant to support her academic aspirations, particularly in medicine, fearing that they would lead her to abandon her faith. She assured him that they would not.Gisella Perl began her medical schooling in Berlin, but when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jewish doctors were frequently ousted from universities and their places of work. Perl then moved back to Hungary and married a surgeon. She was working as a gynecologist in Hungary when the Germans invaded in 1944.That year, the Nazis sent Perl, her husband, son, parents and extended family to Auschwitz. Perls young daughter Gabriella was hidden with a non-Jewish family just before Perls family was taken from the Hungarian ghetto.Perl Is Forced To Work For Dr. Josef Mengele At AuschwitzUpon arriving at Auschwitz, the Nazis separated Gisella Perl from the rest of her family. Her son would die in a gas chamber, and her husband would be beaten to death shortly before the camp was liberated. Gisella Perl was spared, only to be forced into service as an Auschwitz physician under the notorious Josef Mengele.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesDr. Josef Mengele, infamous for his horrific experiments and procedures performed at Auschwitz.Perl was one of the five doctors and nurses chosen to set up a hospital at the camp. Initially, she was tasked with encouraging inmates to donate blood for use by the German army. When Dr. Mengele realized that Perl had been trained in gynecology, however, he ordered her to treat prisoners at the womens camp.Without any of her tools, however, Perl could only soothe the prisoners with her words, and sometimes heal unrelated injuries, like wounds, infected teeth, or broken bones. Her tools, at best, were paper for bandages and a small knife she sharpened on a stone.Dr. Mengele also saw Gisella Perl as an opportunity to obtain information about which inmates were pregnant. In addition to his experiments on twins, Mengele also performed horrific experiments on pregnant women, including vivisection experimentation and, in some cases, autopsy-like surgeries performed on living, waking humans.Mengele told Perl that she was to report all pregnancies to him directly. Pregnant women, he said, would be sent to a different camp one with better care for mother and child.But having already seen the horrors that prisoners faced at the hands of the Nazis, Perl knew better than to believe him. In fact, the Nazi policy was that pregnancy was punishable by death and pregnant women could also suffer the torture of Mengeles operating room before death even came.She decided that she would not tell him about a single pregnancy. How shed keep them a secret, however, she had yet to figure out.Gradually the horror turned into revolt and this revolt shook me out of my lethargy and gave me a new incentive to live, Perl later wrote.Tragically, some women who overheard Perls conversation with Mengele went to him to say that they were pregnant of their own volition. They were experimented on and, ultimately, died. But some of the other pregnant women at Auschwitz would soon be saved by Gisella Perl.The Tragic And Macabre Way In Which Gisella Perl Saved Pregnant PrisonersWikimedia CommonsPrisoners arrive at Auschwitz in 1944.Gisella Perl was faced with an enormous moral crisis: If she delivered the babies so near to where the Nazi physicians were, they would no doubt hear the infants cries and kill everyone in the barracks as punishment. If she turned the pregnant women in, they would die anyway and after suffering at the hands of Mengele and his doctors.So, though it went against her teaching and the social code of the day, she began performing rudimentary abortions in the barracks. She had no tools, nothing to disinfect her hands and no pain relief of any kind.Hundreds of times I had premature deliveries, she told The New York Times. No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.If the pregnancy was too far along when the mother arrived in Gisella Perls care, the gynecologist would rupture the amniotic sac, manually dilate the cervix, and deliver the baby who being preterm died almost instantly.One young woman arrived at the camp nearly full term. The baby was delivered in secret and the mother was sent to the infirmary with pneumonia, a ruse that was chosen because pneumonia was not punishable by death, unlike Typhoid.Perl tried to keep the baby alive, but was afraid that his cries would alert the guards, which would mean death for mother, child, and probably all the women in the barracks. I could hide him no longer, she wrote. I took the warm little body in my hands, kissed the smooth facethen strangled him and buried his body under a mountain of corpses waiting to be cremated.She thought she was doing the best that she could in the face of unimaginably awful circumstances. As Perl wrote, the women she treated, did not know that they would have to pay with their lives, and the lives of their unborn children, for that last, tender night spent in the arms of their husbands.Gisella Perl eventually determined that, in Auschwitz and other concentration camps, the role of the Jewish doctor was not to heal, but to hasten death.International Universities PressThe cover of Gisella Perls 1948 memoir, one of the first texts to expose the Holocausts atrocities to the world.Gisella Perls Life And Career After The HolocaustGisella Perl was released from Auschwitz at the end of the war, by which point nearly her entire family was dead. Distraught, she tried to kill herself shortly after her liberation.After recuperating, Perl did not immediately go back to practicing medicine. Instead she traveled the world to share her experiences and fundraise for refugees. Perl went to New York City in 1947, where she was interrogated on suspicion of assisting Nazi doctors.However, the testimony of inmates saved her. As one survivor said, Without Dr. Perls medical knowledge and willingness to risk her life by helping us, it would be impossible to know what would have happened to me and to many other female prisoners.In 1947, Perl also offered up her testimony for Mengeles planned trial after his claimed arrest by the U.S. Army. The trial never occurred, as Mengele was in fact not caught and continued to live as a fugitive in South America until his death in 1979.In June 1948, Gisella Perl published her memoir entitled I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, which was adapted into an Emmy-winning miniseries in 2003 called Out Of The Ashes.Mount Sinai ArchivesGisella Perl (bottom left) at Mount Sinai Hospital in 1966.Three years later, Gisella Perl gained U.S. citizenship and became an infertility specialist at New Yorks Mount Sinai Hospital, at the suggestion of Eleanor Roosevelt, with whom shed struck up a rapport.She also discovered that the daughter she had hidden before the war had survived, and the two of them moved to Israel, part of a promise she had made before being separated from her husband.We will meet someday, he had said, In Jerusalem. Perl lived in Israel with her daughter until her death in 1988.Public. DomainWhile enduring the horrors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Gisella Perl saved untold hundreds of pregnant women from horrific fates.For many years following the abortions she had been forced to perform in Auschwitz, Dr. Gisella Perl delivered thousands of healthy babies. Before each delivery, she would say the exact same prayer: God, you owe me a life a living baby.After this look at Gisella Perl, read about life at Ravensbruck, a womens concentration camp and learn about the death of Anne Frank. Then, read the horrifying story of concentration camp guard Ilse Koch.The post Inside The Heroics Of Dr. Gisella Perl, The Woman Who Made The Ultimate Sacrifice To Save Hundreds Of Women At Auschwitz appeared first on All That's Interesting.

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