Dr. Gisella Perl's 'I Was A Doctor In Auschwitz'

In “I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz” was published in 1948 by Dr. Gisella Perl as an autobiography of her experiences as a Hungarian Jewish Gynecologist in Nazi concentration camps. Perl begins the novel before Nazi perversity eradicates her village and she recounts her experiences in the death camps. Perl divides the novel into short stories of all the people she encounters in her ultimate quest for survival. Perl devotes her memoir in recognition to the inhumane events that took place. Perl applies a disturbing amount of imagery in every detail she accounts, “The children, little blond or dark-haired children coming from every part of Europe, did not go with their mothers into the gas chambers…(they) were drenched with some inflammable material
Her style of writing as disturbing as it leaves the reader is an appropriate one for the topic she must explain. After reading other Holocaust novels such as “Night” by Elie Wiesel the reader is informed of the sadistic imagination that led to such torture; however, this novel to thoroughly accounts what hell was like from a woman’s standpoint. The subject is often one overlooked, sure everyone knows of the crematories and gas chambers but what about the topic of abortions? This novel offers insight to subjects that normally are not the first to arise in holocaust books. This novel offers the unique stand point of the Holocaust from a woman’s point of view one who endured the torture and survived. Gisella Perl was a mother who had to watch thousands of other mothers watch their children die, a horror unimaginable only to be captured through Gisella Perl. I would recommend this novel possible to be taught in conjunction with other Holocaust literature that is required because of the style Perl uses to portray her unique view point of a horrific