I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz

 

Among the approximately 20,000 books burned at Berlin’s Opernplatz (Opera Square) in 1933, were works by the 19th century German poet, Heinrich Heine, who wrote, “Christianity – and that is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated that brutal Germanic love of war, but could not destroy it.” 

So begins Gisele Perl’s memoir, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz.  A Jewish gynecologist, Dr. Perl struggled to comprehend the depravity she witnessed in the Nazi concentration camp.  She concurred with Heine’s assessment, as well as his prophesy of the recrudescence of “the spirit of destruction, inherent in the German soul.”  Almost 100 years before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Heine had presciently written the words that are memorialized at Israel’s official memorial to the Jewish Holocaust victims, Yad Vashem:  “Where  they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”

In her extraordinary account, Dr. Perl relates her daily experience in Auschwitz, where bodies of the dead were burned, an estimated 1.3 million dead, 90% of them Jewish.  As one of the fortunate few, Dr. Perl survived the concentration camps to return to her chosen profession and bring new life into the world. Her memoir and life provide fitting insights during this month’s national observance of Jewish American Heritage, and last month’s Holocaust Remembrance Week, April 7-14.


From Hungary to Auschwitz

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