The bright angel from Auschwitz: the tragic feat of Gisela Pearl

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

As a prisoner of Auschwitz, she helped thousands of captured women survive. By performing clandestine abortions, Gisella Pearl saved women and their unborn children from the sadistic experiences of Dr. Mengele, who left no one alive. And after the war, this courageous doctor calmed down only when she gave birth to three thousand women.

In 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary. This is exactly how the physician Gisella Pearl lived at that time. She was first transferred to the ghetto, and then with her whole family, son, husband, parents, like thousands of other Jews, they were sent to a camp. There, many prisoners were immediately distributed and taken to the crematorium upon arrival, but some, subjected to a humiliating disinfection procedure, were left in the camp and distributed to blocks. Gisella fell into this group.

Then she recalled that one of the blocks contained cells where hundreds of young, healthy women were sitting. They were used as blood donors for German soldiers. Some girls, pale, exhausted, lay on the floor, they could not even talk, but they were not left alone, periodically the remaining blood was taken from their veins. Gisella kept an ampoule of poison with her and even tried to somehow use it. But she did not succeed - either the organism turned out to be stronger than the poison, or the providence was intent on leaving her alive.

Gisella helped women as much as she could, sometimes even just with her optimism - she told amazing and bright stories that inspired hope in desperate women. Having no tools, no drugs, no painkillers, in conditions of complete unsanitary conditions, she managed to perform operations with only one knife, inserting a gag into the mouths of women so that no screams could be heard.

Gisella was assigned as an assistant in the camp clinic to Dr. Josef Mengele. On his instructions, the camp doctors had to report all pregnant women whom he took for his terrible experiments on women and on their children. Gisella, in order to prevent this, tried to save women from pregnancy, secretly giving them abortions and causing artificial childbirth, so that they did not get to Mengele. The day after the operation, women had to go to work so as not to arouse suspicion. So that they could lie down, Gisella diagnosed them with severe pneumonia. About three thousand operations were carried out by Dr. Gisella Pearl in Auschwitz, hoping that the women operated by her will still be able to give birth to children in the future.

At the end of the war, some of the prisoners, including Gisella, were transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp. They were released in 1945, but few of the prisoners lived to see this bright day. When she was released, Gisella tried to find her relatives, but found out that they were all dead. In 1947 she left for the United States. She was afraid to become a doctor again, memories of those months of hell in Mengele's laboratory haunted, but soon, nevertheless, she decided to return to her profession, especially since she had gained colossal experience.

But problems arose - she was suspected of being in connection with the Nazis. Indeed, in the laboratory she sometimes had to be an assistant to the sadist Mengele in his sophisticated and inhuman experiments, but at night, in the barracks, she did everything in her power to help women, alleviate suffering, save them. Finally, all suspicion was cleared, and she was able to start working in a hospital in New York as a gynecologist. And every time, entering the delivery room, she prayed:. Over the next few years, Dr. Giza helped to give birth to more than three thousand babies.

In 1979, Gisella moved to live and work in Israel. She remembered how in the stuffy carriage that was taking her and her family to the camp, she and her husband and father swore to each other to meet in Jerusalem. In 1988, Dr. Gisella died and was buried in Jerusalem. More than a hundred people came to see Gisella Pearl on her last journey, and in the message about her death, the Jerusalem Post called Dr. Giza "the angel of Auschwitz."

And about the woman who, risking her own life, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, took 2,5 thousand children out of the Jewish ghetto, everyone found out only in 1999. It was Irena Sendler.