The doctor's role is always to heal whether that be to lend a helping hand, whether that
be to comfort, whether that be to listen.
I began my work with Holocaust survivors and I've been interested in resiliency and the
issue of how do people deal with trauma, and then I became interested in perpetrators and
did a book on the Nazi doctors in the Nuremberg trials.
Then I said, "Gee, I've been doing all this, why don't I work on the doctors, the Jewish
doctors, and try to put together in one place all of the documents, and all of the histories,
all of the stories, all of the interviews of Jewish doctors in the ghettos and camps
during the Holocaust?"
When I came to college, the reason I came to BU was to do medical ethics, and specifically,
Jewish medical ethics, and when I came to Dr. Grodin I really didn't know very much
about Jewish doctors and the Holocaust.
So we just started reading and reading and reading and talking to a lot of Holocaust
scholars to try and find these texts because they are few and far between in English.
The physicians that were involved in the Holocaust did not write in general after the war; it
was kind of a general conspiracy of silence.
Many of them had a lot of guilt about what had happened and what went on during that
time and a lot of concern that people wouldn't understand the horrible decisions that they
had to make under incredible circumstances.
Dr. Gisela Perl was a gynecologist during the Holocaust in Auschwitz. I think her story
was the most poignant for me.
We were given no medicines, no instruments. The fever-ridden patients shivered on the
bare planks without blankets. Lice crawled over their bodies carrying germs from one
to the other.
Gisela Perl was an incredibly resilient woman. She was able to do the abortions and even
the killing of the newborns.
There was just no chance of survival and the mother would be killed, so mothers that somehow
hid their pregnancy until that point, she still aborted those children.
No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy these babies. After years and years
of medical practice, child birth was still to me the most beautiful, the greatest miracle
of nature.
I love those newborn babies. Not as a doctor, but as a mother, and it was again and again
my own child whom I killed to save the life of a woman.
You have zero resources. You know that the fact that you are trying to save somebody
else makes you less likely to survive.
But she did what she had to do, and she was able to give hope, hope in a place of no hope.
God was good to me. By a miracle every one of these women recovered and was able to work
which, at least for a while, saved her life.
Physicians found themselves in every place that other Jews found themselves whether it
be in the ghettos, in the camps, but they had a special role to play and a special obligation
to try to help rather than to be bystanders.
There were hospitals in the Warsaw ghetto, there was a medical school that was established,
places where you can imagine they tried to maintain normalcy, and so the Warsaw ghetto
hospital was a remarkable place where they had inadequate facilities, inadequate equipment,
inadequate medications, and yet they tried to do whatever they could with whatever they had.
What they had was the ability to try and convince their patients that their lives would go on,
that this was a stage.
People looked up to the doctors, and so, if the doctors were able to carry on then perhaps
in someway they were able to carry on as well.
The letter that Dr. Elkes wrote to his children after he had them smuggled out of the ghetto
I think is the text that stands out most in my mind.
Dr. Elkhanan Elkes, he was the head of the Judenrat in Kovno in the Kovno ghetto. A lot
of doctors were placed in these positions of power within the ghettos especially.
Whenever the Nazis were doing action, so picking out people who would live and who would die,
he would stand there for hours and hours and try and negotiate for each individual person
to be kept alive.
One of the issues was who would be able to get back to work because that was their life.
If you couldn't work you'd be killed, so a decision had to be made.
I am the man who with my own eyes saw those about to die. With my own ears I heard the
awe-inspiring and terrible symphony, the weeping and screaming of ten-thousand people old and
young, a scream that tore at the heart of Heaven.
And so he wrote this letter to his children that he had smuggled out of the ghetto. He
just writes about how the only thing that brings him and his wife any comfort as they're
sitting starving to death in the ghetto is fantasizing about how his children are going
to grow up and the fact that they will grow up and who they're going to be.
Our inner most desire is to see you again, to embrace you, and tell you once again how
close we are to you, and how our hearts beat as we remember you and see you before us.
As we stand here at the very gates of Hell with a knife poised in our necks, only your
images, dear ones, sustain us.
This letter was also smuggled out to his children that he never ever saw again.
For me I think what was so compelling about this project was that specific medical ethics:
how Jews during the Holocaust made these decisions, how their professions influenced them.
We can never, nor should we ever, hopefully, be in the situation to have to make the kind
of decisions they made. The most important thing that I've learned is that there is an
incredible will to maintain one's dignity and one's sense of self.