![]() In June 1948, Gisella Perl published the story of her incarceration at Auschwitz, detailing the horrors she encountered as an inmate gynecologist. Perl was the sole author or coauthor of nine papers on vaginal infections published between 19. In 1951, at the age of 44 she was granted U.S. She began work as a gynecologist at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, starting as the only female phsyician in labor and delivery, and becoming a specialist in infertility treatment. In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt convinced her to start practicing medicine again. The INS interrogated her on suspicion of assisting the Nazi doctors of Auschwitz in carrying out human rights abuses. On March 12, 1948, President Truman signed a bill allowing Perl to stay in the US. New York Representative Sol Bloom unsuccessfully petitioned the Justice Department for permanent residency of the United States. She moved to an upper class neighborhood in New York. In March 1947 she arrived in New York City on a temporary visa to lecture, sponsored by the Hungarian-Jewish Appeal and the United Jewish Appeal. She tried to commit suicide by poisoning herself and was sent to recuperate in a convent in France until 1947. She found that her husband, only son, her parents and her extended family had all been murdered in the Holocaust. She was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, her final Holocaust destination, and soon liberated. She is best known for temporarily saving the lives of hundreds of women by aborting their pregnancies, as pregnant women were often beaten and killed or used by Dr. Josef Mengele gave her the task to work as a gynecologist within the women's camp, attending to inmates without bare necessities such as antiseptics, clean wipes, or running water. Ephraim Krauss, and practiced until 1944, when Nazi Germany occupied her hometown during its invasion of Hungary and deported Perl to the Auschwitz concentration camp along with her family. Perl became a successful and well known gynecologist in Sighetu Marmaţiei. Her father, Maurice Perl, refused to allow her to study medicine at first, because he feared she was going to "lose her faith and break away from Judaism". In 1923, when she was 16, she graduated from secondary school first in her class, the only woman and the only Jew. Gisella Perl was born and grew up in Máramarossziget (now Sighetu Marmaţiei), then part of Hungary, which after the Trianon peace treaty of 1920 became part of Romania (and was again part of Hungary in 1940-44). She became a specialist in infertility treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York and eventually moved with her daughter to live in Herzliya, Israel, where she died. Perl survived the Holocaust, emigrated to New York, and was one of the first women to publicize the Holocaust experience in English, in her 1948 memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. ![]() She worked without the bare necessities for practicing medicine. Gisella Perl (10 December 1907 – 16 December 1988) was a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, where she helped hundreds of women, serving as an inmate gynecologist for them. One son (Imre murdered in the Holocaust) and one daughter (Gabriella Krauss Blattman) After decades out of print, this new edition will ensure the crucial place of Perl's testimony on Holocaust memory and education.Holocaust memoir I was a doctor in AuschwitzĮphraim Krauss (murdered in the Holocaust) 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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