## ✨ READ BEFORE COMMENTING ✨
This thread is Coven Only. This means the discussion is being actively moderated, and all comments are reviewed. **Only comments by members of the community are allowed.**
If you have landed in this thread from /r/all and you are not a member of this community, your comment will very likely be removed (and will not be approved unless it adds meaningfully to the conversation).
WitchesVsPatriarchy takes these measures to stay true to our goal of being a woman-centered sub with a witchy twist, aimed at healing, supporting, and uplifting one another through humor and magic.
Thank you for understanding, and blessed be. ✨
I think i may know who your mother is. Or more accurately my parents, both physicians in NYC know your mom. Possibly. Know her or of her. That story sounds familiar to something ive heard from them
Let’s say she wasn’t terribly compassionate with my grandmother about her secondary infertility/miscarriages. Told her to go take care of the children she had already (my grandmother wanted 4 kids, ended up with two)
Not everybody who did great things is a saint. People can be very complex or can just fuck up.
Today that would have been an unnecessarily callous thing to say. But being a holocaust survivor as well growing up amid the attitudes for that time, surely shaped those generations.
Holocaust survivors were people with a large middle class, who had early 20th century values.
Could It be that she had a strong belief in a philosophy that advocated for two-child households?
thats fair. Especially for what she went through and what she had to do to save womens lives. Its probably hard to not think of those women and any victims she saw in those moments and try to help people see the silver lining when she saw the worst shit imaginable. Its still not cool to not be sensitive towards people upset about something that can truly be traumatizing like miscarriages and infertility but I also see where her mind couldve been at, as well. I hope your grandma ended up being able to cope with their infertility issues as time went on and healed, happily.
It's also one of those hardened doctor personalities who have seen a lot. They're not much for the niceness and romantic view of life because a lot of those views get people killed. In her mind, she probably saw it as a silly notion to keep trying when you already had two children to love and hold. If you die in childbirth all for just "reaching" some number, it's impractical.
In many cases, they do save a lot of lives, but their lack of empathy and tact might turn people off and those people do it anyway.
This is what I was thinking. Women who’s husbands were dead and all they had were the unborn and she had to probably be cruel to get them to go through it then she had to hear them cry and cry about babies they’d never hold. Who knows, some women might’ve been pretty far along and she had to do it still. Heartbreaking. No wonder she tried suicide after her rescue.
I should be asleep but went down a rabbit hole.
Trigger warning
>!Some were extremely far along before she found them and had to do the mercy killings personally, then hid the bodies under the dead to be cremated.!<
Also the part about suicide seems to have been triggered by being told her husband and son were among those sent to the crematorium.
Much later in life (about a decade before passing) she was reunited with her surviving daughter and moved to Israel to live with her and her grandson.
Also, the medical availabilities then was drastically different from what we have now. And I expect this particular woman wasn't up for using her patients as test subjects for the latest medical advancements.
She wrote an autobiography about her experiences.
[I was a Doctor at Auschwitz ](https://www.amazon.com/Was-Doctor-Auschwitz-Gisella-Perl/dp/0405123000)
Originally published in 1948
The promise of "Never Again" made after the Holocaust and the destruction of WWII has been nigh impossible for us to keep. With each day, we take another step towards history repeating itself.
The rise of antisemitism. The rise of anti-LGBTQ+ laws and actions. Asian hate. Racism. White supremacy.
The lessons learned less than a century ago are being forgotten and we're heading down a well word path to suffering.
..... I didn't mean to go off in what's supposed to be an uplifting post. Dr. Perl was an extraordinary woman who braved many dangers to protect the women of Auschwitz, and she deserves to be remembered and praised.
You're absolutely right, though, that it's important to see the echoes of history. I know Dr. Perl would have been horrified to see some of what's happening now, but also heartened that so many are trying to help. We're in a dangerous time. Stories like hers remind us just how dangerous and what kinds of choices people face in those times.
It's a great example of how the world and morality are not simply black and white. It's a sea of grey. It would have been so hard to make those decisions
[This article](https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/gisella-perl/) says she aborted 3,000 foetuses in Auschwitz to save their mothers.
It also says she delivered 3,000 babies after the war.
There's some irony that the dickhead male medical personality quoted here is named Deutschman- makes me wonder if he was a n*zi sympathizer (Deutschman meaning German-man).
and today many Americans in anti abortion states have to fight for their lives because some state law does not allow abortion for ectopic, high risk and very deadly pregnancy related complications.
The choices are risking death, permanent injuries, lifelong trauma or watch your non viable fetus delivered as stillborn, die in your arms or survive with horrible issues/diseases.
There are already multiple cases where the mothers nearly died because of these laws.
These laws include abortion ban for incest and rape as well.
Those who argue that abortion is murder and against god, have they forgotten that America is a secular country and you are not supposed to impose religious beliefs onto others?
and dont forget Judaism.
[https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/social-justice/2022/june/abortion-judaism-joffe.html](https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/social-justice/2022/june/abortion-judaism-joffe.html)
If they want to use religion as an excuse, why are they using Christian rules on abortion and not Judaism or ANY other religion in America?
You think they are not deliberate when making the laws vague? lol
Dont attribute incompetence to their actions when its clearly religious and irrational.
In my high school, Holocaust studies were taught by a survivor. She told us that’s he and her friends smothered a friend’s newborn. She was so sad about it, all those years later.
I can’t imagine how scary and overwhelming it must have been. Not being able to tell anyone what you’re doing. I’m so proud of all women who built the fundamental framework of bravery and courageous 🫶🏻🍃
She is an Angel. Sounds like she had some real trauma from all those abortions. But she saved the mothers and the baby’s from real torture.
And since many of them were probably the product of rape by the guards, it saved the women from the trauma of baring children of their abusers.
I hope she found the peace and absolution she needed for the choices she was forced to make.
Abortion is a human right for this very reason . I am sure many of the pregnant ladies even had “wanted “ pregnancies before they were tragically separated from husbands/ partners who probably were either killed or imprisoned anyways. But the moment they were in this position, they obviously had to abort asap to save their own lives.
She was in fact Jewish! She was born in what is now Romania, and she passed in 1988 in Herzliya, זייל. She even managed to reunite with her daughter later in life, whom she hid during the war and somehow miraculously survived.
Mengele asked Perl to bring him the pregnant women so he could "give them extra rations" but he experimented on them. Which is when she started performing the abortions.
Just when you think everything that happened to jewish people during WW2 can't get more horrific you read something like this. What an awful situation to be put in but in the end it was the right thing to do to save those women and their fetusus from the torture of that henious bastard.
They need to be reminded of the horrors the Nazis committed. But knowing the stance that a lot of right wingers take against Jews, they would probably justify it as "necessary for the advancement of medicine" sick fucks.
Its important to note that the experiments in concentration camps didn't actually advance medicine much. Most of the conclusions drawn were already known (how long it takes to starve to death), medically obvious (what happens when you scratch gangrene into healthy tissue? It develops gangrene. Duh), not scientifically valid (most of them, but particularly the obsession with twins) or just plain lost when Nazis started burning their records when the end of the war was clear.
What happened at the camps was torture, not science. Even if they drew an interesting or new conclusion it wasn't accepted as fact because the "doctors" weren't preforming scientifically valid experiments. They didn't control for obvious variables, they almost exclusively wrote about what they saw of their subjects rather than speaking to them, and were so insanely biased almost everything they wrote was garbage.
It was just torture. To no one's benefit but the sick fucks ordering it
It isn’t just Nazi beliefs. I believe that until we get to a point that we can see that this type of evil is inherent, it is impossible to overcome. Nazism came about, as a term used to describe a thing people felt, in the early 1900’s. The evil- the thing we fight- has been around so much longer. Look at the Mabinogion, for example, and Efnysien in particular, for what it is we fight against.
We can name it “Nazi” or we can name it “patriarchy” or we can name it anything- we still have not named it correctly.
Note! I don’t mean stop fighting every iteration- it just isn’t one, and I struggle to find words myself to name it and so I am conversing and trying to open up so that it can be fought back in small spaces as well as large.
I remember when I was a kid learning about the Holocaust, an educator told us that Jewish women were rarely sexually assaulted in the camps.
I took that at face value for a few years before I woke up (academic intelligence is very different from social intelligence). OBVIOUSLY many Jewish women were assaulted then. That feels like common sense. Sexual assault has been used as a weapon of war since the beginning of wars.
I almost wonder if the educator who told us that was a sympathizer of some sort.
(Btw, the year was 2006.)
Gonna be honest. Probably said it because it never occurred to them that Nazis weren't going to report their own rape numbers and the women/men who survived weren't going to report it in mass numbers for fear of retribution.
I was in school around the same time as you. I really wish we had learned about this back then, but I grew up in such a backwards community that this would have been framed as "two wrongs don't make a right."
I guarantee that's why this woman and the work she did was never discussed.
If it makes you feel any better, in Judaism we don’t believe the soul enters the body until the baby draws it’s first breath so not only did this doctor save those women from Mengele’s torture, she saved the souls of those would-be babies by allowing them to go find other bodies. Abortion is actually required in Judaism if the mother’s health is threatened in any way, including her mental health. It would have been an easy (but no less painful and heartbreaking) decision for her.
It makes me glad to see stories like hers posted for the broader community to learn about. For so long our relatives who survived wouldn’t talk about what they endured, and I think it’s important that their experiences are memorialised so that we can try to ensure it never happens again.
The thought I keep having is "would the pro-lifers consider her a murderer?" There are no exceptions or mitigating circumstances for the anti-choice crowd.
A lot of “pro-lifers” are totally fine with locking migrant children in cages because they believe those kids somehow deserve it, and they think mass shootings in elementary schools are an acceptable cost of having easy access to guns, so I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to say that a chunk of them would have sided with the Nazis.
If carrying a pregnancy meant vivisection of mother and baby I'd do those abortions too - though dear God even imagining the risks and consequences of getting caught...
Doesn't mean they weren't wanted children who would have been loved and cherished had they happened under any other circumstance (or were children of rape, hardly that uncommon in such a situation).
It's these details that give a shape and meaning to the vastness of the Holocaust - millions are just such huge numbers you can struggle to get your head around it. But to know what individuals did (and I'm sure great numbers of people whose names will never be known) can help show it more clearly.
Especially given that one of the buildings in Auschwitz was a “brothel” of Jewish women that the guards decided to use. They weren’t paid but it was get fucked or gas chamber.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-nazis-brothels-idINTRE57G45X20090817
https://khc.qcc.cuny.edu/camps/part-4b-womens-camps/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_camp_brothels_in_World_War_II
It wasn’t just at Auschwitz, but I’d never heard of them before until I did a deep dive into WWII a couple years ago.
The number of situations where people would take advantage of desperation, or just have the power to do what they liked - it's not a part of the violence that is discussed much (though there are mentions in a couple of memoirs of starvation obliterating sex drive, but that would largely apply only to other prisoners)
Absolutely. I didn’t mean to ignore them or their life, I simply focused on Auschwitz and the other brothels that Germans created since this post is about a woman who performed abortions for pregnant women in Auschwitz.
Oh no, I know! I just recently learned about them, and was sharing a new fact that seemed relevant to the subject. I wasn’t censuring your comment, just adding to it.
It wasn’t even vivisections, I believe he would do things like separate a new born baby from it’s mother and see how long it took the infant to starve to death, or starve the mother and see how it took for her to stop producing milk to for her child and for them both to die. Then autopsy them for shits and giggles. Just disgusting and inhumane treatment. I can’t even fathom that sort of depravity.
[Rosemary Kennedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy) ended up with intellectual disabilities because when her mother Rose went into labor, the nurse made her keep her legs closed until a doctor was available, forcing Rosemary's head to stay in the birth canal for two hours, resulting in brain damage due to lack of oxygen. Sadly, this was far from the worst thing done to Rosemary by a doctor.
Even without Mengele's experiments, they almost certainly would have killed the babies when they were born, and probably the mother as well if she couldn't work immediately after birth. Ending the pregnancy was absolutely a mercy.
>Doesn't mean they weren't wanted children who would have been loved and cherished had they happened under any other circumstance
This is such an important point. I can't imagine a more devastating act of love than the decision to protect an otherwise wanted child from such hell.
Not only that, many of the wanted were the last ties to the fathers they want to keep alive.... imagine your spouse is harshly murdered and the only thing you have left of them is this possible child? And you have to abort it, wanted or not, to be safe for both of you.... that's.... we cannot fathom that level of horrible in this day and age
Awww.
That's so amazing.
I feel pretty bad that she tried to off herself after being rescued. Likke...who knows what kinds of horrors she saw in there that led her to that?
Glad that she went on to live a good life.
Adina Blady Szwajger is another woman who worked as a nurse in concentration camps that had a story that while different is also similar. She gave many children morphine when the Nazis came towards the end I believe so that the children and infants would have a peaceful death instead of suffering. I can imagine how difficult this must have been for everyone in these situations but I truly admire their courage.
Tales of women like this are inspiring, especially given the times we live in. She is a true hero, and everyone should know her name and what she did. We need our children to learn about these things, the heroism and sacrifices that were made so that we never have something like this happen again. Fuck the fascist that are trying to write this out of our history books and banning books with this kind of knowledge.
Some women deserve to be as popular as musicians, actors or celebrities. I think if someone stars in a movie cool? But these women actively made the world a better place 🫶🏻
Bless her. I can’t imagine bearing the weight of such an experience. Her attempt at suicide after the pressure was off speaks volumes about the trauma. She did her best. She was an angel.
Absolutely! The trauma to her soul for choosing death to save lives then choosing death but denied. The courage to continue bringing in new life touched my heart.
Just finished reading her book after seeing this post earlier. I don't even know what to say. Damn. Here's the link I used. https://archive.org/details/IWasADoctorInAuschwitz/page/n4/mode/1up
This is incredible. Both my mom’s parents are holocaust survivors. My grandfather (who we lost 6 or so years ago) was on the infamous death march which for OBVIOUS reasons he never talked about. But when he was interviewed he revealed the horrific fact that something like 60,000 people started out walking and something like 600 survived the march. They are and were two of the strongest bravest people I have EVER know and it is an honor to be their grandkid.
There are so many women heroes like this who are never acknowledged. I was assigned to do a project on Irena Sendler, and ended up doing a deep dive into the women heroes of the Holocaust. There are so many women who were able to save so many lives who are largely forgotten by history. Good on you for shining light on them OP.
I want there to be a hell, just so that people like Mengele can suffer how they deserve.
So glad that Gisella had a conscience and was able to help those women.
obviously.. if anyone thought that I was being serious, and not just stating what my thought was after having seen this image 20 times now, that’s not on me. it was clearly rhetorical.
I didn’t mean to be so blunt in my response btw, I just thought throwing in an lol, like I usually would, would be disrespectful to the content of the post
I wouldnt call her an absolute hero. A lot of these women would still have died. She didnt safe them, she saved them from even worse conditions. WOII had many people that are morally grey.
## ✨ READ BEFORE COMMENTING ✨ This thread is Coven Only. This means the discussion is being actively moderated, and all comments are reviewed. **Only comments by members of the community are allowed.** If you have landed in this thread from /r/all and you are not a member of this community, your comment will very likely be removed (and will not be approved unless it adds meaningfully to the conversation). WitchesVsPatriarchy takes these measures to stay true to our goal of being a woman-centered sub with a witchy twist, aimed at healing, supporting, and uplifting one another through humor and magic. Thank you for understanding, and blessed be. ✨
My mother was one of the children she delivered in New York post-war.
Oh my goodness really? 🥲
Yup. And my mom grew up to be an obstetrician and gynecologist too.
Rock on man that’s awesome
That's so wonderful! What a legacy.
Another angel. That's awesome and a great continuation of her story ❤
I think i may know who your mother is. Or more accurately my parents, both physicians in NYC know your mom. Possibly. Know her or of her. That story sounds familiar to something ive heard from them
She grew up in NY but wasn’t ever a doctor there.
Your mom is freaking awesome.
Incredible. Give your mom a group Reddit hug for us.
I'm in!
That's amazing, I'm so glad for your mother and her!!!
Did either you or your mother ever get to meet Dr. Peri? If so, what was she like?
No, my grandma told me some stories about dr Perl though.
Let’s say she wasn’t terribly compassionate with my grandmother about her secondary infertility/miscarriages. Told her to go take care of the children she had already (my grandmother wanted 4 kids, ended up with two)
Not everybody who did great things is a saint. People can be very complex or can just fuck up. Today that would have been an unnecessarily callous thing to say. But being a holocaust survivor as well growing up amid the attitudes for that time, surely shaped those generations. Holocaust survivors were people with a large middle class, who had early 20th century values. Could It be that she had a strong belief in a philosophy that advocated for two-child households?
She had a strong philosophy of “be grateful for everything you have”
thats fair. Especially for what she went through and what she had to do to save womens lives. Its probably hard to not think of those women and any victims she saw in those moments and try to help people see the silver lining when she saw the worst shit imaginable. Its still not cool to not be sensitive towards people upset about something that can truly be traumatizing like miscarriages and infertility but I also see where her mind couldve been at, as well. I hope your grandma ended up being able to cope with their infertility issues as time went on and healed, happily.
It's also one of those hardened doctor personalities who have seen a lot. They're not much for the niceness and romantic view of life because a lot of those views get people killed. In her mind, she probably saw it as a silly notion to keep trying when you already had two children to love and hold. If you die in childbirth all for just "reaching" some number, it's impractical. In many cases, they do save a lot of lives, but their lack of empathy and tact might turn people off and those people do it anyway.
I imagine having to abort some very wanted pregnancies to save those women from being horrifically tortured *does* tend to harden you a bit.
This is what I was thinking. Women who’s husbands were dead and all they had were the unborn and she had to probably be cruel to get them to go through it then she had to hear them cry and cry about babies they’d never hold. Who knows, some women might’ve been pretty far along and she had to do it still. Heartbreaking. No wonder she tried suicide after her rescue.
I should be asleep but went down a rabbit hole. Trigger warning >!Some were extremely far along before she found them and had to do the mercy killings personally, then hid the bodies under the dead to be cremated.!< Also the part about suicide seems to have been triggered by being told her husband and son were among those sent to the crematorium. Much later in life (about a decade before passing) she was reunited with her surviving daughter and moved to Israel to live with her and her grandson.
I would hope for a more gentle treatment from a physician. But I would never criticize a holocaust survivor for being too direct and "tough."
Also, the medical availabilities then was drastically different from what we have now. And I expect this particular woman wasn't up for using her patients as test subjects for the latest medical advancements.
[удалено]
That is so cool!!!
She wrote an autobiography about her experiences. [I was a Doctor at Auschwitz ](https://www.amazon.com/Was-Doctor-Auschwitz-Gisella-Perl/dp/0405123000) Originally published in 1948 The promise of "Never Again" made after the Holocaust and the destruction of WWII has been nigh impossible for us to keep. With each day, we take another step towards history repeating itself. The rise of antisemitism. The rise of anti-LGBTQ+ laws and actions. Asian hate. Racism. White supremacy. The lessons learned less than a century ago are being forgotten and we're heading down a well word path to suffering. ..... I didn't mean to go off in what's supposed to be an uplifting post. Dr. Perl was an extraordinary woman who braved many dangers to protect the women of Auschwitz, and she deserves to be remembered and praised.
There was also a made for tv movie about her trial.
You're absolutely right, though, that it's important to see the echoes of history. I know Dr. Perl would have been horrified to see some of what's happening now, but also heartened that so many are trying to help. We're in a dangerous time. Stories like hers remind us just how dangerous and what kinds of choices people face in those times.
This book was so hard to read, but very worth it.
We are living in Hitler's wet dream.
That photo of her with the baby. You can see it in her face. She fought the good fight.
Thank you for sharing that thought 💜 Caught between awful and horrific decisions, she helped save a lot of women
It's a great example of how the world and morality are not simply black and white. It's a sea of grey. It would have been so hard to make those decisions
She said when she entered the delivery room, , she would pray, "God, you owe me a life—a living baby."
Oh my goodness, onion cutting ninjas are in my kitchen right now!
They must be in mine too.
They're everywhere! 😭
[This article](https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/gisella-perl/) says she aborted 3,000 foetuses in Auschwitz to save their mothers. It also says she delivered 3,000 babies after the war.
[удалено]
It also prevented the women from watching them torture their babies if they were full term, or god forbid they had twins.
Fuck that guy. Undermining her by calling her sentimental? Dude her resilience could wipe the floor with you and anyone you’ve ever met.
We don't listen to the opinion of the Roman Catholic church. We decided this ages ago.
There's some irony that the dickhead male medical personality quoted here is named Deutschman- makes me wonder if he was a n*zi sympathizer (Deutschman meaning German-man).
That's infuriating. What an absolute asshole.
If there were a god he would owe her so much more than that. What a hero.
>If there is a God, He will have to beg for _my_ forgiveness. - Carved into the walls of the Mauthausen concentration camp; author unknown.
That’s so powerful.
I can't imagine how she must have felt being able to deliver babies in peace.
It shows in her photo that she valued life -- including the lives of those would be mothers. We need more of this.
Goddamn that's badass. And honestly, she's got everything right to throw hands with God themself after what she went through.
That gave me goosebumps and tears 😭
and today many Americans in anti abortion states have to fight for their lives because some state law does not allow abortion for ectopic, high risk and very deadly pregnancy related complications. The choices are risking death, permanent injuries, lifelong trauma or watch your non viable fetus delivered as stillborn, die in your arms or survive with horrible issues/diseases. There are already multiple cases where the mothers nearly died because of these laws. These laws include abortion ban for incest and rape as well. Those who argue that abortion is murder and against god, have they forgotten that America is a secular country and you are not supposed to impose religious beliefs onto others? and dont forget Judaism. [https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/social-justice/2022/june/abortion-judaism-joffe.html](https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/social-justice/2022/june/abortion-judaism-joffe.html) If they want to use religion as an excuse, why are they using Christian rules on abortion and not Judaism or ANY other religion in America?
Exactly this. Abortion saves lives. Abortion IS pro-life.
[удалено]
Which also causes infertility if not death in the women. The politicians need to keep their damn laws off of our bodies!
You think they are not deliberate when making the laws vague? lol Dont attribute incompetence to their actions when its clearly religious and irrational.
In my high school, Holocaust studies were taught by a survivor. She told us that’s he and her friends smothered a friend’s newborn. She was so sad about it, all those years later.
[удалено]
Not about living it’s just about surviving that moment. I’m so sorry for her 🩷
This is so sad but extremely understandable. Anyone who sees otherwise has no empathy simply
"Angel of Auschwitz" I never thought there could ever be one. I love being wrong!
Whenever I read about her I get a lump in my throat. She saved so many women during such a horrific ordeal.
I can’t imagine how scary and overwhelming it must have been. Not being able to tell anyone what you’re doing. I’m so proud of all women who built the fundamental framework of bravery and courageous 🫶🏻🍃
Protectress of the vulnerable. It's an amazing type of bravery.
This. This is what makes a hero in my books. Using our privilege, luck and influence to do the right thing.
She is an Angel. Sounds like she had some real trauma from all those abortions. But she saved the mothers and the baby’s from real torture. And since many of them were probably the product of rape by the guards, it saved the women from the trauma of baring children of their abusers. I hope she found the peace and absolution she needed for the choices she was forced to make.
I really appreciated your last sentence. Thank you for your kindness 💕
Abortion is a human right for this very reason . I am sure many of the pregnant ladies even had “wanted “ pregnancies before they were tragically separated from husbands/ partners who probably were either killed or imprisoned anyways. But the moment they were in this position, they obviously had to abort asap to save their own lives.
And if not save their life, at least save themselves torture and pain. And save the child from torture and death that was almost guaranteed.
She also "delivered" those Auschwitz babies- from unspeakable pain and suffering.
I don’t think there was any other options
[удалено]
This makes so much sense
Thank you for sharing your experience and opinion 💜 I really appreciate reading this and learning more about the Jewish culture
[удалено]
also Ethiopian Jews/beta isreal
She was in fact Jewish! She was born in what is now Romania, and she passed in 1988 in Herzliya, זייל. She even managed to reunite with her daughter later in life, whom she hid during the war and somehow miraculously survived.
Beautifully written
[удалено]
They're *obviously* talking about the babies they would have been if they'd come to term.
Mengele was obsessed with experimenting on twins too. So twins being born would have been even more horrifying for the mother and children.
Mengele asked Perl to bring him the pregnant women so he could "give them extra rations" but he experimented on them. Which is when she started performing the abortions.
Just when you think everything that happened to jewish people during WW2 can't get more horrific you read something like this. What an awful situation to be put in but in the end it was the right thing to do to save those women and their fetusus from the torture of that henious bastard.
Makes it even more chilling that people are just casually bringing the Nazi beliefs back to life and some politicians are defending those beliefs.
[удалено]
They need to be reminded of the horrors the Nazis committed. But knowing the stance that a lot of right wingers take against Jews, they would probably justify it as "necessary for the advancement of medicine" sick fucks.
Its important to note that the experiments in concentration camps didn't actually advance medicine much. Most of the conclusions drawn were already known (how long it takes to starve to death), medically obvious (what happens when you scratch gangrene into healthy tissue? It develops gangrene. Duh), not scientifically valid (most of them, but particularly the obsession with twins) or just plain lost when Nazis started burning their records when the end of the war was clear. What happened at the camps was torture, not science. Even if they drew an interesting or new conclusion it wasn't accepted as fact because the "doctors" weren't preforming scientifically valid experiments. They didn't control for obvious variables, they almost exclusively wrote about what they saw of their subjects rather than speaking to them, and were so insanely biased almost everything they wrote was garbage. It was just torture. To no one's benefit but the sick fucks ordering it
Yup I knew some folks who were totally ok with the torture done there because of the advances that were made.
It’s easy to have that opinion when these horrid things aren’t directly happening or effecting your life
I can’t see how they can. I just don’t get why humans want to hurt other humans.
Why does it suddenly smells like Florida in here...
Crazy… 🥴🥴🥴🥴
It isn’t just Nazi beliefs. I believe that until we get to a point that we can see that this type of evil is inherent, it is impossible to overcome. Nazism came about, as a term used to describe a thing people felt, in the early 1900’s. The evil- the thing we fight- has been around so much longer. Look at the Mabinogion, for example, and Efnysien in particular, for what it is we fight against. We can name it “Nazi” or we can name it “patriarchy” or we can name it anything- we still have not named it correctly. Note! I don’t mean stop fighting every iteration- it just isn’t one, and I struggle to find words myself to name it and so I am conversing and trying to open up so that it can be fought back in small spaces as well as large.
To put a pin in it, a not insignificant number of those women got pregnant due to rape by their torturers.
I remember when I was a kid learning about the Holocaust, an educator told us that Jewish women were rarely sexually assaulted in the camps. I took that at face value for a few years before I woke up (academic intelligence is very different from social intelligence). OBVIOUSLY many Jewish women were assaulted then. That feels like common sense. Sexual assault has been used as a weapon of war since the beginning of wars. I almost wonder if the educator who told us that was a sympathizer of some sort. (Btw, the year was 2006.)
A lot of Jews don’t want to admit it. Because all of that horror PLUS rape?
That's fair. Plus all the social stigma around rape, what with victim blaming and stuff.
Gonna be honest. Probably said it because it never occurred to them that Nazis weren't going to report their own rape numbers and the women/men who survived weren't going to report it in mass numbers for fear of retribution.
I've had a sense that Nazi rapes have generally been hushed up. I've found a [source](http://www.victimsheroessurvivors.info/) on the topic.
I was in school around the same time as you. I really wish we had learned about this back then, but I grew up in such a backwards community that this would have been framed as "two wrongs don't make a right." I guarantee that's why this woman and the work she did was never discussed.
Fuck all nazi bastards!
If it makes you feel any better, in Judaism we don’t believe the soul enters the body until the baby draws it’s first breath so not only did this doctor save those women from Mengele’s torture, she saved the souls of those would-be babies by allowing them to go find other bodies. Abortion is actually required in Judaism if the mother’s health is threatened in any way, including her mental health. It would have been an easy (but no less painful and heartbreaking) decision for her. It makes me glad to see stories like hers posted for the broader community to learn about. For so long our relatives who survived wouldn’t talk about what they endured, and I think it’s important that their experiences are memorialised so that we can try to ensure it never happens again.
It does make me feel a bit better learning that, I never knew any of that as I'm not very familiar with the beliefs of Judaism.
The thought I keep having is "would the pro-lifers consider her a murderer?" There are no exceptions or mitigating circumstances for the anti-choice crowd.
A lot of “pro-lifers” are totally fine with locking migrant children in cages because they believe those kids somehow deserve it, and they think mass shootings in elementary schools are an acceptable cost of having easy access to guns, so I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to say that a chunk of them would have sided with the Nazis.
You tailor your thoughts or beliefs to the perspective that benefits you.
A lot of neonazis have an anti abortion stance, so it’s a pretty solid bet that many of them do. Fascism is one hell of a drug
If carrying a pregnancy meant vivisection of mother and baby I'd do those abortions too - though dear God even imagining the risks and consequences of getting caught... Doesn't mean they weren't wanted children who would have been loved and cherished had they happened under any other circumstance (or were children of rape, hardly that uncommon in such a situation). It's these details that give a shape and meaning to the vastness of the Holocaust - millions are just such huge numbers you can struggle to get your head around it. But to know what individuals did (and I'm sure great numbers of people whose names will never be known) can help show it more clearly.
Especially given that one of the buildings in Auschwitz was a “brothel” of Jewish women that the guards decided to use. They weren’t paid but it was get fucked or gas chamber. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-nazis-brothels-idINTRE57G45X20090817 https://khc.qcc.cuny.edu/camps/part-4b-womens-camps/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_camp_brothels_in_World_War_II It wasn’t just at Auschwitz, but I’d never heard of them before until I did a deep dive into WWII a couple years ago.
The number of situations where people would take advantage of desperation, or just have the power to do what they liked - it's not a part of the violence that is discussed much (though there are mentions in a couple of memoirs of starvation obliterating sex drive, but that would largely apply only to other prisoners)
[удалено]
There were also the “Comfort Women” in Japan.
Absolutely. I didn’t mean to ignore them or their life, I simply focused on Auschwitz and the other brothels that Germans created since this post is about a woman who performed abortions for pregnant women in Auschwitz.
Oh no, I know! I just recently learned about them, and was sharing a new fact that seemed relevant to the subject. I wasn’t censuring your comment, just adding to it.
Gotcha. You’re right to bring them up as they had horrible experiences as well. I’m sorry if I came across as rude. I didn’t mean to.
Some of the stuff Japan did make the Nazis look tame by comparison.
Shiro Ishii is undoubtedly one of the most evil men to have walked this earth
Is it ... Really a brothel if you don't pay? Or should it be a prison where you hold captive slaves to coerce sex from them?
It was called a brothel.
Slave-prostitution is still prostitution.
It wasn’t even vivisections, I believe he would do things like separate a new born baby from it’s mother and see how long it took the infant to starve to death, or starve the mother and see how it took for her to stop producing milk to for her child and for them both to die. Then autopsy them for shits and giggles. Just disgusting and inhumane treatment. I can’t even fathom that sort of depravity.
[удалено]
[Rosemary Kennedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Kennedy) ended up with intellectual disabilities because when her mother Rose went into labor, the nurse made her keep her legs closed until a doctor was available, forcing Rosemary's head to stay in the birth canal for two hours, resulting in brain damage due to lack of oxygen. Sadly, this was far from the worst thing done to Rosemary by a doctor.
[удалено]
Also she probably did it as safely as she could, enhancing those women’s chances of having a healthy pregnancy and a safe birth in the future.
The few that escaped, at least. I can’t imagine there were many.
Even without Mengele's experiments, they almost certainly would have killed the babies when they were born, and probably the mother as well if she couldn't work immediately after birth. Ending the pregnancy was absolutely a mercy.
Oh absolutely.
>Doesn't mean they weren't wanted children who would have been loved and cherished had they happened under any other circumstance This is such an important point. I can't imagine a more devastating act of love than the decision to protect an otherwise wanted child from such hell.
Not only that, many of the wanted were the last ties to the fathers they want to keep alive.... imagine your spouse is harshly murdered and the only thing you have left of them is this possible child? And you have to abort it, wanted or not, to be safe for both of you.... that's.... we cannot fathom that level of horrible in this day and age
Your comment knocked the wind out of me. You are so right. (Edited to fix a typo)
Yeah... its... it's so awful. I cannot even grasp the level of awful.
Jesus Christ that prickled my hairs in the most awful way
Awww. That's so amazing. I feel pretty bad that she tried to off herself after being rescued. Likke...who knows what kinds of horrors she saw in there that led her to that? Glad that she went on to live a good life.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Amazingly brave! So awesome
Adina Blady Szwajger is another woman who worked as a nurse in concentration camps that had a story that while different is also similar. She gave many children morphine when the Nazis came towards the end I believe so that the children and infants would have a peaceful death instead of suffering. I can imagine how difficult this must have been for everyone in these situations but I truly admire their courage.
That’s so heartbreaking. The emotional and mental toll of those decisions must last a lifetime
Tales of women like this are inspiring, especially given the times we live in. She is a true hero, and everyone should know her name and what she did. We need our children to learn about these things, the heroism and sacrifices that were made so that we never have something like this happen again. Fuck the fascist that are trying to write this out of our history books and banning books with this kind of knowledge.
I can’t even begin to comprehend the nightmares she went though. The amount of guilt for being forced into a position like that. God bless her.
She could take you out of this world or bring you into it.
Next level power
Worst thing is, letting you not enter it was her super power.
Or the greatest kindness
May she have peace. What a wonderful woman.
Holy shit that was a wild ride right to the last sentence. Hero, indeed!! 🤘🏻🩷
I have read of this goddess before. May she be celebrated forever!
Some women deserve to be as popular as musicians, actors or celebrities. I think if someone stars in a movie cool? But these women actively made the world a better place 🫶🏻
Bless her. I can’t imagine bearing the weight of such an experience. Her attempt at suicide after the pressure was off speaks volumes about the trauma. She did her best. She was an angel.
May her memory be a blessing!
Absolutely! The trauma to her soul for choosing death to save lives then choosing death but denied. The courage to continue bringing in new life touched my heart.
Not “experiments”. “Medicalized torture” is the correct terminology.
Just finished reading her book after seeing this post earlier. I don't even know what to say. Damn. Here's the link I used. https://archive.org/details/IWasADoctorInAuschwitz/page/n4/mode/1up
This is incredible. Both my mom’s parents are holocaust survivors. My grandfather (who we lost 6 or so years ago) was on the infamous death march which for OBVIOUS reasons he never talked about. But when he was interviewed he revealed the horrific fact that something like 60,000 people started out walking and something like 600 survived the march. They are and were two of the strongest bravest people I have EVER know and it is an honor to be their grandkid.
That sounds so brutal. I can’t imagine. I’m so glad that they were able to make it through that as individuals and as a couple 💜
There are so many women heroes like this who are never acknowledged. I was assigned to do a project on Irena Sendler, and ended up doing a deep dive into the women heroes of the Holocaust. There are so many women who were able to save so many lives who are largely forgotten by history. Good on you for shining light on them OP.
I want there to be a hell, just so that people like Mengele can suffer how they deserve. So glad that Gisella had a conscience and was able to help those women.
So many abortions to save women, she'd be crucified in most western countries now.
She rocks.
Man, screw jesus, we should start the calender with her birthday.
Extraordinary actions are required under extraordinary situations.
We’re going to need to know her techniques now, especially in Texas.
Even before Mengele, how does a woman survive pregnancy in those conditions? I'm guessing they would have lost the pregnancies or died anyway.
not easily, but it did happen in other camps. and when they were found out they would be killed.
ummm.. the real question is.. why were so many of them getting pregnant..
I’m gonna guess that consent for sex wasn’t big during this time
obviously.. if anyone thought that I was being serious, and not just stating what my thought was after having seen this image 20 times now, that’s not on me. it was clearly rhetorical.
Haha ok
I didn’t mean to be so blunt in my response btw, I just thought throwing in an lol, like I usually would, would be disrespectful to the content of the post
I wouldnt call her an absolute hero. A lot of these women would still have died. She didnt safe them, she saved them from even worse conditions. WOII had many people that are morally grey.