Gisella Perl. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2019 edition of a 1948 book.
Introduction by Phyllis Lassner and Danny M. Cohen;
Afterword by Eva Hoffman. 125pp. Index. ISBN 9781498583947 pbk.
Thanks to academics Phyllis Lassner and Danny M. Cohen a 2019 edition of an out-of-print 1948 memoir by Dr. Gisella Perl, a Rumanian Holocaust survivor, offers much to learn much from. It was artfully written when all was searingly fresh in the author’s mind only three years after her liberation. By no means a comprehensive overview of the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, Perl’s story is a unique recounting of one woman’s efforts to make a difference under impossible conditions.
Perl was appointed the Auschwitz concentration camp’s gynecologist and head of a 9-person hospital for 32,000 women prisoners. Her hospital became “a small oasis in a swamp of savage misery and crime.” (p. 63) The close-knit staff provided “such acts of human greatness, kindness, sacrifice, and selflessness that witnessing them made life worth living.” (p. 62)
In the camp, she witnessed anti-Semitic excesses, beastly Nazi women guards, crippling work routines, endless standup assembles, gratuitous savage beatings, barely edible and inadequate food, murder by fire, selling sex in exchange for necessities, unremitting tortures, etc. To survive, luck also played a large part, as in not having a food cup stolen or falling sick with contagious typhus.
Perl describes bouts of anguish and rue while telling of many creative high-risk successes in helping others against incredible odds. For example, for alleviating skin problems, she promoted margarine as “the best medicine for all kinds of disease,” this a placebo at best. (p. 51) Details are shared of fellow prisoners who also sought to relieve suffering and increase the survival chances of less fortunate others. Like Perl they independently sought to show that, “we could keep our human dignity in the face of every humiliation, every torture … I was going to remain a human being to the last minute of my life.” (p. 42)
Women prisoners were introduced by Perl to practicing conversations about “the good old days,” fantasies of life after liberation, verbal games like “When I am again a Lady,” and gentle competitions of favorite recipes taught by loving mothers, all of these vital balms against Nazi mass dehumanization efforts. Ceaseless overt cruelty was blunted by ceaseless hidden caring and compassion.
Illustrative here of heart-rending complexity was the writer’s difficult resolve as an obstetrician and mother twice-over to secretly perform abortions and infanticides lest the Nazis send expectant mothers to the fires of the crematorium. After curfew in the dark of far-flung barracks, and with the skilled aid of the camp Underground, she facilitated many hundreds of procedures, reassuring distraught patients they could have many babies after liberation.
Unforgettable figures are profiled. On the dark side there is the infamously malicious doctor, Josef Mengele, whom Perl was forced to assist in ghastly pseudo-experiments on prisoners (pregnant women, infants, twins, etc.). Comparably criminal was an abortion patient, SS Officer Irma Grese, later hung by the British, who Perl considered, “the most depraved, cruel, imaginative sexual pervert I ever came across.” (p. 45)
On the bright side Perl knew many women prisoners whose comradery significantly helped bolster her own survival. She saw herself as a “partisan fighting against the Nazis by trying to save some of the lives they intended to destroy … I smiled and spread encouragement, faith, peace, and the will to live … their deep attachment to me, their need for affection, warmed my soul, and they in turn helped me to endure the innumerable sufferings of our daily lives in Auschwitz.” (p. 89)
When the war began to rapidly end and Auschwitz was being abandoned to advancing Russian troops, the writer was transferred to direct a small obscure prison-like hospital in a suburb of Hamburg. Her patients were utterly exhausted foreign slave laborers, recklessly hurt on 12-hour work shifts. Soon thereafter, Allied bombing forced the triage-like transfer by cattle car of only salvageable patients to Belsen-Bergen, another camp in Germany.
There Perl was put in charge of its “Maternity Block,” a barracks without medical supplies or resources. From camps only in Germany, pregnant women prisoners – Jews and non-Jews – had been sent to have babies to be immediately offered to childless German families. The writer asks, “What could two empty hands do to relieve the indescribable suffering of [lice-covered] hundreds?” (p.111) She nevertheless never gave up, but “fought on … [and] tried to smile at them through the layer of filth that covered my own face, and whispered hoarse, unconvincing words of comfort.” (p.112)
By 1945, the camp had become a notorious dumping ground, a “dung-heap” where “mass dying was a consequence of lack of planning.” (p. 107) Perl recalls that it “can never be described because every language lacks the suitable words to depict the horrors … no food, no water, no medicine … only a slow and horrible death ….” (p. 108)
On the camp’s April 15, 1945 liberation, “even the most hardened [British] warriors were crying, vomiting, and cursing at this never-imagined depth of human depravity.” (p. 108) The ensuing British discovery of sealed camp warehouses filled with food, medicine, etc., that could have saved lives has Perl wrathfully cry, “Let no one speak to me of German culture, German civilization! Belsen Bergen was the faithful portrait of German civilization – Belsen-Bergen mirrored the German soul ….” (p. 109)
Post liberation, Perl explains how thousands of prisoners were saved. British General Glen Hughes, who directed the liberation, rushed valuable supplies to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Surviving inmates “will forever bless his name.” (p. 113) A young Vatican Mission Catholic priest, Father Brand, worked selflessly to help others and provided truckloads of material support, including food, books and toys for children, etc. When Perl attempted suicide on learning her husband and son had been murdered, Brand transferred her to a convent for recovery. Before leaving to provide aid in other camps, he asked her to “believe in love and to give love wherever I go.” (p.121)
In 1948 while writing her memoir, Perl contends that questions such as whether or not “goodness, love, and justice will ever again reign on this earth,” remained unanswered. (p. 17) However, about Auschwitz and similar Nazi camps in 24 occupied European and North African countries, she firmly charges readers with never forgetting their “morass of depravity, crime, and the enjoyment of torture [lest] more innocent victims of German inhumanity swell their ranks ….” (p. 12)
Each of the Six Million represented to her an “entire, colorful, exciting human life, a past, and what’s even more, a future ….” (p. 88) Overall, Perl would have us understand that “responsibility for the world we live in lies not with man but with his education,” (p. 17) Her memoir has become a distinctive aid in meeting the education challenge. Perl’s multi-faceted legacy – in the form of the book and her exemplary life – enriches our understanding of the Holocaust.