Mengele, she began to perform surgeries that before the war she would have believed herself incapable of - abortions. Perl's startling realization of the fates of the pregnant women discovered by Dr. Reamey has suggested that Gisella Perl made a controversial decision to deal with Mengele's experiments: "After Dr. 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.''Īnne S. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz. ![]() So women began to run directly to him, telling him, 'I am pregnant.' I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him. I said tonight will be the New Year, tomorrow a better year will come.'' So I made a party with the bread, margarine and dirty pieces of sausage we received for meals. I didn't know when it was Rosh ha-Shanah, but I had a sense of it when the weather turned cool. She performed surgery, without anesthesia, on women whose breasts had been lacerated by whips and become infected." Gisella admitted: ''I treated patients with my voice, telling them beautiful stories, telling them that one day we would have birthdays again, that one day we would sing again. Mengele to operate a hospital ward that had no beds, no bandages, no drugs and no instruments, she tended to every disease wrought by torture, starvation, filth, lice and rats, to every bone broken or head cracked open by beating. Nadine Brozan has argued: "As one of five doctors and four nurses chosen by Dr. Gisella Perl later provided information on the activities of Dr. By the end of the war fat wheat would grow out of their ashes and the soap made of their bodies would be used to wash the laundry of the returning German heroes." The blood donors, along with the other prisoners of Auschwitz would never live to tell their tale. We were too 'inferior' to live, but not too inferior to keep the German army alive with our blood. Rassenschande or contamination with 'inferior Jewish blood' was forgotten. The German army needed blood plasma! The guinea pigs of Auschwitz were just the people to furnish that plasma. Big, strong SS men were going from one to the other sticking tremendous needles into their veins and robbing their undernourished, emaciated bodies of their last drop of blood. Their pulse was almost inaudible, their breathing strained and deep rivers of blood were flowing around their bodies. The other hundred were lying on the ground, pale, faint, bleeding. From the cages along the walls about six hundred panic-stricken, trembling young women were looking at us with silent pleading in their eyes. The sight which greeted us when we entered Block VII is one never to be forgotten. One of the tasks that Gisella had to carry out was to persuade inmates to give blood: "The doctors of the hospital were sent for. Gisella was allowed to live because she was employed as a doctor at Auschwitz. As they entered into what, for many, would be their final resting place, families were separated into two lines: those going to the right were subjected to forced labor (about 3,000 people) while those going to the left were exterminated immediately in the gas chambers (7,000-9,000 people)." Perl's transport arrived at the gates of Auschwitz. After eight excruciating days packed tightly into cattle cars with almost no food or water, Dr. ![]() Perl and her family were forced into a ghetto before being transported to Auschwitz in March 1944. ![]() Reamey has pointed out: "As with many Jews across Hungary, Dr. Gisella and the rest of her family, were deported to extermination camps. She married a surgeon and was working as a gynecologist in Máramarossziget when the German Army invaded the country in 1944. ![]() She asked her father to send her to medical school, but he refused at first, saying "I do not want my daughter to lose her faith and break away from Judaism.'' Several months later, she approached him again, this time with a prayer book he had given her, and said, ''I swear on this book that wherever life will take me, under whatever circumstances, I shall always remain a good, true Jew.'' Maurice Perl now changed his mind and she was able to enroll in medical school. At 16 years old, Gisella Perl graduated first in her secondary-school class, the only woman and the only Jew. Gisella Perl was born into a Jewish family in Hungary in 1907.
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