#Gisella perl professional#

She would recall evenings spent listening to her son play violin, surrounded by undulating green and gold fields in the shadow of the snow-capped Carpathian Mountains.īut life soon became increasingly difficult for Hungarian Jews as they too were pushed out of their positions and public life. Perl managed to return to Hungary, where she became a beloved doctor and worked alongside her husband, a surgeon named Ephraim Krauss.

#Gisella perl professional#

But when the National Socialist Party rose to power in 1933, Jewish doctors – including gynaecologists – were increasingly stripped of their positions and purged from universities, professional societies and government. Jews were well-integrated into the German medical scene during the years of the Weimar Republic, comprising more than half the doctors in Berlin. Perl enrolled in medical school and studied for years in Berlin, which was at that time a mecca for Jewish physicians. She was born in the late 19th Century in Sighet, a small town in Hungary (after the war, it would become part of Romania) that was also the birthplace of future Nobel Peace Prize Winner Elie Wiesel. Judaism played a central role in Perl’s childhood. The ethics were situational, but I think she believed that anything that opposed the aggressive genocide of Nazi ideology was inherently ethical.” “She couldn’t hide behind the fact of, ‘Oh, I would never do an abortion that wasn’t necessary.’ It wasn’t a luxury she had. “In a certain sense, she was living in a time and place where you couldn’t talk about pure ethics,” says Sara R Horowitz, a scholar of gender and the Holocaust at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies at Canada’s York University. Perl’s actions would haunt her for years after the war, but the moral question of whether to end Jewish prisoners’ pregnancies was likely clear to her. “I think when she fully understood what was going on, she didn’t hesitate,” says Eva Hoffman, an author and daughter of Holocaust survivors who wrote the afterword to the 2019 edition of Perl’s memoir.

She used her position and expertise to intervene on behalf of pregnant women. But “if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered”.īy virtue of her gender and her medical specialty, Perl found herself in the very heart of the Nazi machinery which sought to “obliterate the biological basis of Jewry”: mothers and potential mothers. “No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy these babies,” she wrote. The New York woman who saved 90,000 babies.The little-known scientist who changed fertility forever.It was the only way the women would have even the slightest chance of survival – and someday, she hoped, would have the chance to have a child in freedom. She would hide any pregnant women she found and, if necessary, interrupt her pregnancy, or quietly deliver and then kill, the newborn child. To defy the Nazi extermination project and help women survive, she had to invert her skills as a healer and bringer of life. To Perl, nothing was more miraculous than the birth of a child. Perl soon realised that these women were marked for death. When Dr Josef Mengele, the camp’s chief physician, learned her specialty, he ordered her to report every pregnant woman to him personally.

Since April 1944 Perl had been imprisoned in the Hungarian Women’s Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she was tapped by the Nazis for her skills as a doctor and gynaecologist. It was a rare moment of triumph near the end of an unimaginably painful journey. “Half an hour later I had the water, the disinfectant, and could wash my hands and perform the operation, not as a helpless prisoner, but as a doctor,” she would recall in her 1948 memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. Outside the barracks, she ran into a high-ranking British soldier and begged for antiseptic and water – luxuries she had been working without. Perl knew she needed to operate, but she had no instruments. Her face and lips grew pale, and blood coursed out between her legs. To Perl, Marusa’s final scream sounded “almost jubilant”.īut as Marusa held the newborn in her arms, her condition began to worsen. Perl heard trumpets sound, and British soldiers began entering Bergen-Belsen. But there was one major difference: unlike the others, this baby would live.Īs Marusa pushed through the last stages of labour, the two women heard a shout of liberation go up. The mother, a young Polish woman named Marusa, was feverish and weak. On 15 April 1945, Dr Gisella Perl delivered a crying, screaming baby.Īs for all of her other deliveries in the last year, the Hungarian gynaecologist had no tools, no anaesthetics and no assistance.