I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz.
A Wrenching Account By A Forced Participant And Resistor,
Jewish Hungarian Survivor And Activist
—
Inscribed One Year After Publication
To A Fellow Doctor And Humanitarian
Perl, Dr. Gisella. I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. New York: International Universities Press, (1948).
8vo.; green-blue cloth; spine browned; spine stamped in black. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this survivor memoir, an important contribution to Holocaust survival and resistance literature detailing the experiences of a Jewish female gynecologist forced to assist in the decimation of her own people at Auschwitz. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page to a fellow humanitarian and doctor one year after publication: I offer my book / to / Dr. J. Wechsler / with my best / wishes / Dr. Gisella Perl / Nov. ~1949. Reprinted in 1979.
Scarce inscribed; we have only seen one other offered on the open market: with a less poignant inscription than this one it was dated some fifteen years later.
The story of Dr. Gisella Perl, Hungarian Jew, concentration camp survivor, and unwitting collaborator in the Nazi regime despite her ongoing attempts at resistance, is an extremely painful but important and oft-commemorated story. Various websites exist dedicated to Dr. Perl’s life and work, and in 2003 the cable TV channel Showtime brought her horrific but ultimately inspirational story to the masses with “Out of the Ashes,” a movie starring Christine Lahti as the heroic Dr. Perl. The movie, based on this memoir, was greeted with great acclaim and resulted in a wave of familiarity, among a new audience, with the horrors of the Nazi regime and the story of Dr. Perl and the brave Jews like her who resisted their internment even as they faced it daily.
Perl (birth date unknown) was a Hungarian-born Jewish gynecologist who was captured and interned at Auschwitz. That she survived is a testament to her strength, spirit, and internal dignity, especially in the face of a compulsion by Nazi authorities to use her medical skills to assist in the systematic destruction of fellow inmates at the behest of Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious “medical” villain of the Holocaust. Perl’s ceaseless resistance is the subject of this memoir, dedicated to the family she lost to the death camps: her parents, her four brothers, and her husband and son.
Eventually, Perl was liberated, but when she applied for U.S. citizenship in 1946 she was hauled before military court and cruelly made to account for her “collaboration” with the Nazis: the U.S. officials were especially disturbed by the number of illegal abortions Perl performed at Auschwitz without her superiors’ knowledge (approximately 1,000). In military court, as in I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz, Perl struggled to explain to her relentless interrogators that she was not a willing collaborator, and that she in fact terminated the lives of the unborn in order to save thousands of pregnant women from the Nazi gas chambers. This moving explanation, told in a series of extended flashbacks, eventually convinced the military tribunal, and Perl was allowed to emigrate to the U.S., where she set up her medical practice in New York.
She immediately set about writing her story for the reasons that so many others did, so that the world would not be able to forget. I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz, tough but necessary reading for anyone who cares about documenting Jewish history and the history of the resistance, is her story. Perl later moved to Jerusalem, where she died in 1988. That year, Christine Lahti read Perl’s story and was so moved by it that she convinced the producers at Showtime to allow her to star in the movie documenting her resistance. After making the movie, Lahti commented on its content and effect:
“We all wanted to explore the gray tones,” Lahti said, “what we call the ‘choiceless choices’ - things she had to do to survive but things that were not so honorable.” Among thos
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