I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz

Gisella Perl’s memoir is the extraordinarily candid account of women’s extreme efforts to survive Auschwitz. With writing as powerful as that of Charlotte Delbo and Ruth Kluger, her story individualizes and therefore humanizes a victim of mass dehumanization. Perl accomplished this by representing her life before imprisonment, in Auschwitz and other camps, and in the struggle to remake her life. It is also the first memoir by a woman Holocaust survivor and establishes the model for understanding the gendered Nazi policies and practices targeting Jewish women as racially poisonous. Perl’s memoir is also significant for its inclusion of the Nazis’ Roma victims as well as in-depth representations of Nazi women guards and other personnel. Unlike many important Holocaust memoirs, Perl’s writing is both graphic in its horrific detail and eloquent in its emotional responses. One of the memoir’s major historical contributions is Perl’s account of being forced to work alongside Dr. Josef Mengele in his infamous so-called clinic and using her position to save the lives of other women prisoners. These efforts including infanticide and abortion, topics that would remain silenced for decades and, unfortunately, continue to be marginalized from all too many Holocaust accounts. After decades out of print, this new edition will ensure the crucial place of Perl’s testimony on Holocaust memory and education.

Seven decades after its first publication, Gisella Perl’s account of her time in Auschwitz still has the power to startle and disturb almost beyond the reader’s capacity to absorb its awful details. Perl is a faithful reporter, recording, with an unmediated fidelity, the humblest and the most abhorrent physical facts; but her writing is infused with enough rage to have burned several barracks of Auschwitz [and] a power of compassion which accords full, individual humanity to her fellow inmates, whom the Nazis tried so utterly to dehumanize, which give a moral force to Perl’s memoir that only a few outstanding chronicles of that time—Primo Levi’s in particular—possess., In an era that will see the end of direct survivor testimony, the reprint of I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz is a timely and vital contribution to Holocaust studies. Originally published in 1948, Gisella Perl’s memoir bears witness to the horrors of the concentration camps but also the cataclysmic rupture of communities and individual lives. Bookended by an eloquent scholarly introduction by editors Lassner and Cohen and an Afterward by the second-generation writer Eva Hoffman, the new edition of Perl’s devastating account situates the memoir in the twin genres of survivor narratives and women’s Holocaust writing and frames the 'unspeakable,' the 'unimaginable' into a stunning work of testimony and an ongoing act of witnessing., Gisela Perl's memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz is a searing document that speaks to the soul of humanity. Perl tells her readers about the hideous inversion of values brought about by Nazi camps of death where killing newborns was necessary to save their mothers lives. First published over 70 years ago, this memoir has great contemporary relevance for an age in which the sanctity of human life is once again being called into question. Phyllis Lassner and Danny M. Cohen are owed an enormous debt of gratitude for helping readers become (re)acquainted with Perl's shattering testimony., Lassner and Cohen deserve praise and gratitude for pursuing and bringing to fruition the republication of I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. One of the first published by an Auschwitz survivor, Perl’s memoir not only recounts the horrors of existence in Auschwitz, which included grave moral challenges and efforts to resist, but also engages many of the questions that have shaped the field of Holocaust Studies. Lassner and Cohen serve the reader well with their outstanding introduction that contextualizes Perl’s memoir in the history and the  historiography of the Holocaust, particularly as related to understandings of women’s experiences. They also chose wisely to end the new edition with a poignant essay by Eva Hoffman. Students and scholars alike will benefit from this new edition for years to come.  

Phyllis Lassner is professor emerita in the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University. Her most recent book is Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film. Danny M. Cohen is associate professor of instruction at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and the Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies.