Career
She was given the task of working as a gynecologist within the womens" camp, attending to inmates through their disease and discomfort without bare necessities such as antiseptics, clean wipes, or even running water. She is best known however, for temporarily saving the lives of hundreds of women by aborting their pregnancies, as pregnant women were often beaten and killed or used by Doctor Josef Mengele for vivisections. She tried to poison herself and was sent to recuperate in a convent in France until 1947.
Upon her arrival in New York City in March 1947, she was interrogated on suspicion of assisting the Nazi doctors of Auschwitz in carrying out human rights abuses.
She was granted United States. citizenship in 1951. She began work as a gynecologist in New York"s Mount Sinai Hospital, becoming an specialist in infertility treatment.
In June 1948, Gisella Perl published the story of her incarceration at Auschwitz, detailing the horrors she encountered there as an inmate gynecologist. The book was titled and included Perl"s description of operations on young women"s breasts without anesthetics, using a knife as her only instrument.
The procedure was observed by warden Irma Grese, who derived pleasure from their suffering.
Perl"s account of these treatments was virtually identical in every detail to the court testimony of Doctor Olga Sulima, an inmate physician at Auschwitz from the Soviet Union, according to historian Bernard Braxton. Likewise, the infirmary encounters with Irma Grese, a 19 year old Aufseherin from Auschwitz were first described not by Perl, but by a Hungarian female prisoner at the Auschwitz, surgical assistant Olga Lengyel, in her 1947 book Five Chimneys, originally published in French. Lengyel was the first survivor to have her testimony published in English, wrote Zoë Waxman.
Perl"s memoir was one of at least eight similar accounts by female prisoners corroborated by the testimonies of other women.
