Gisella Perl

**Gisella Perl** (10 December 1907 &ndash; 16 December 1988) was a Romanian-born Jewish gynecologist, medical surgeon, a writer, and a Nazi concentration camp survivor who, during her imprisonment in Auschwitz, saved the lives of hundreds of girls and women, especially those who had a disease or those who were pregnant in the camp by secretly performing an abortion on them, in order to prevent them from being murdered. She was chosen as the camp's gynecologist and surgeon by the infamous Josef Mengele, but due to the poor and horrible conditions, she was obviously forced to perform an operation with primitve tools and with almost no access to supplies, but managed to succeed due to her years of formal medical training and study of medicine. She risked her own life of being murdered, for the pregnant women she was aborting, yet she successfully was able to keep the abortions a secret. Due to the rapid Soviet advance, Gisella Perl and thousands of other women and girls from Auschwitz were deported by the German officers and guards to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany in the autumn of 1944, where Gisella Perl survived the typhus epidemic that spread throughout the camp and killed thousands of inmates there. After she was liberated from the concentration camps, when World War II ended, she went to live in a convent in France, after being unsuccessful in her attempts to commit suicide, and later immigrated to the United States, where she wrote a memoir recounting her experiences as a camp gynecologist and surgeon risking her life by performing secret abortions, entitled *I Was A Doctor in Auschwitz*, which was published as a book in 1948. Virtually everyone in her immediate family, and a lot of people in her extended family, were murdered by the Germans during World War II, and she was left in severe guilt and despair in the years after the war ended. She has continued her work as a gynecologist since then, and has wrote several books on diseases including vaginal infections and treatments.

## Early life
Perl was born December 10, 1907, in the town of Sighetu Marmaţiei in Romania (called Transylvania at the time). At age 16, she graduated first in her high school class; she was the only woman and the only Jew in the class.  She wanted to be a doctor, but at first her father would not let her. Later she told the *New York Times*:
"[My father said] '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 relented, and she enrolled in medical school. Years later, on the day she was paid a fee by her first patient, she bought another prayer book and had engraved on it her father's name....

Her father carried that book into the crematorium in Auschwitz."  Dr. Perl was allowed to live because she was a doctor. She was given the job of working as a doctor in the camp. Diseases (like all kinds of infections), injuries, malnutrition, and many other problems were very common among the inmates. This was because of horrible living conditions at the camps, where inmates were beaten, not given enough food, not given clean water or toilets, were forced to work very hard, and had to live so close together that diseases spread very quickly.

Dr. Perl is most famous for saving the lives of hundreds of women by aborting their pregnancies. This saved the women's lives because pregnant women were often beaten and killed, or used by Dr. Josef Mengele for vivisections (which means they were cut open without any anesthesia. because the warden, Irma Grese, liked watching them suffer.

## Publications
Dr. Perl was later reunited with her daughter, Gabriella Krauss Blattman, whom she managed to hide during the war. They both moved to live in Herzliya, Israel. Perl died in Israel in 1988. She was the sole author or coauthor of nine papers on vaginal infections published between 1955 and 1972.

In 2003, a film entitled *Out of the Ashes* was released. It was based upon the story of Dr. Perl's life, and starred Christine Lahti as Dr. Perl.

## Related pages
* The Holocaust
* Auschwitz concentration camp
* Dr. Josef Mengele
* Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

## References
## Other websites
* Gisella Perl: Angel and Abortionist in the Auschwitz Death Camp 
* Gisella Perl 
* Journal of Women's Health, Profiles: Dr. Gisella Perl