This week, I learned about Gisela Pearl. She was a Jewish-Hungarian doctor who worked in Aushwitz and performed secret abortions to protect women from Nazi "experimentation" and death.
The policy on pregnant women in Auchwitz was simple to start
with - they were gassed as soon as the pregnancy was discovered. But the Nazi
Dr Mengele started to devise alternative plans for these women and asked Perl
for all pregnant women to be sent to him personally for separate treatment. He
said this would involve milk and extra food. As soon as Perl discovered that
these women were in fact being used for horrific experiments, she stopped
sending the women and tried, instead, to end the pregnancies herself.
In all, she performed approximately 3000 abortions in the
hope that the women would survive and later be able to bear children, if they
chose, in freedom
Perl also risked her life giving medical assistance to men
and women who had been deliberately poisoned, or otherwise experimented on by Mengele.
She did this during the night, hoping she wouldn’t be caught. She had no medical equipment and very few
drugs but she did what she could...
"'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. I didn't know when it was Rosh ha-Shanah, but
I had a sense of it when the weather turned cool. So I made a party with the
bread, margarine and dirty pieces of sausage we received for meals. I said
tonight will be the New Year, tomorrow a better year will come.''
Perl survived but many of her family did not. Years later she
said in an interview with the New York Times, ''It is worthwhile to live.” (Quotes
from taken from New York Times interview, 1982: http://www.nytimes.com/1982/11/15/style/out-of-death-a-zest-for-life.html)
Perl’s place in the Nazi machine was deeply complex, given
her position as a woman, a Jew and a physician working for the Third Reich, and
her actions have been deemed controversial by some. She was operating within a
system where sterilization and the termination of Jewish mothers, babies and
foetuses was actively encouraged as part of the Nazi policy to eradicate all
traces of Jewishness and ‘impurity’. Perl’s actions did not, and could not
possibly, subvert this project. She was aborting the same ‘bad’ foetuses, and
in some cases killing those same ‘impure’ babies that Hitler wanted dead. But
within the death machine that was Auschwitz, the children of women inmates
could not possibly survive. Babies, too, were experimented on and killed.
Mengele devised ways of observing babies starve to death – he taped one woman’s
breasts to watch her baby try to suckle day after day until it died.
It goes without saying that the Nazi’s forced abortions had
nothing to do with women’s choice. Both ‘Aryan’ and non-Aryan women didn’t
really have one. In 1933, the director of
the women’s clinic of Berlin’s Charite Hospital claimed “the nation’s stock of
the ovaries a national resource and property of the German state” (http://www.ima.org.il/FilesUpload/IMAJ/0/45/22849.pdf).
Bavaria’s official medical journal declared abortion a type of treason when
carried out on ‘pure’ women (quoted in the above article). Sexism was an innate
part of Nazism, and just as racially ‘pure’ women were ordered to produce as
many children as possible, ‘impure’ women were forbidden to reproduce, or to
have children who would live. All women
were the forced-curators of a cultural heritage decided by others – by Nazi men.
Agency was forbidden. Therefore women prisoners who tried to end their own
pregnancies, or to help other women to do the same, were punished by a trip to
the gas chambers. By eking any power at all for themselves – including power
over their own bodies - they were not behaving as absolute subjugates, and this
threat had to be destroyed. (Hedgepeth
& Saidel (2010) Sexual Violence against Jewish Women in the Holocaust). [2]
In the context of Auschwitz, Perl’s actions were about as
subversive as they could be. She informed women of their fate if they continued
with the pregnancy and worked to save the mothers’ lives. Unlike the more controversial
figure of Lucie Adelsberger, an inmate physician who performed abortions to
save women but often without - and sometimes against- their consent, Perl
has been so far been spoken of positively by survivors. The issues of consent
and coercion are not clear, however. Some survivors never forgave the
abortionists who claimed to have acted in their interests. And very little must
have felt clear to the inmate physician, whose job had been to nurture and care
for human life, when operating in the context of what was ultimately a death
camp. It doesn’t bear thinking about and it is hard to judge these things.
Rightly or wrongly, physicians even today would see it as their job to work in
the interests of the patient when the patient isn’t deemed well enough or
‘sane’ enough to make their own decisions. The women in the camp would have
been starved, ill, and deeply disturbed. The issue is one of women’s rights but
also, more broadly, the rights of the patient in a medical environment.
At something of a
loss myself after writing about these events, the only way I feel I can finish
is with this poem by Avrom Sutzkever. The third stanza is a painful reminder of
the women and children who couldn’t be saved.
Let us never forget.
By Avrom Sutzkever
July 10, 1944
Have you seen, in
fields of snow, frozen
Jews, row on row? Blue
marble forms
lying, not breathing,
not dying.
Somewhere a flicker of
a frozen soul -
glint of fish in an
icy swell. All brood.
Speech and silence are
one.
Night snow encases the
sun.
A smile glows immobile
from a rose lip's
chill. Baby and
mother, side by side. Odd
that her nipple's
dried.
Fist, fixed in ice, of
a naked old man: the
power's undone in his
hand. I've sampled
death in all guises.
Nothing surprises.
Yet a frost in July in
this heat - a crazy
assault in the street.
I and blue carrion,
face to face. Frozen
Jews in a snowy
space.
Marble shrouds my
skin. Words ebb. Light
grows thin. I'm
frozen, I'm rooted in
place like the naked
old man enfeebled
by ice.
[1.] Gilsela Perl,
NYT interview.
[2.] It is possibly pertinent to point out here that while
the fascist British National Party here in the UK claims it is in opposition to
Muslims because Islam is unfair to women, it is also constitutionally against women
of all colour having reproductive rights. This is essentially the same old
belief in ‘bad heritage’ needing to be wheedled out to purify the nation, while
women of ‘good heritage’ are expected to reproduce whether they want to or not.