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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.
Through some wonderful help of students at Boston University I was able to try to put
together in one place all the documents and all the histories, all the stories, all the
interviews of Jewish doctors in the ghettos and camps during the Holocaust.
One of the big reasons that I really believe in this project is because I think we have
a lot to learn from seeing people who had to make really difficult decisions.
The physicians that were involved in the Holocaust found themselves in every place that other
Jews found themselves, but they had a special obligation to try to help rather than to be
bystanders.
I think it's important that people know these stories.
Dr. Gisella 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.
What hit me the most, I actually ended up doing a lot of research on this subject from
the Jewish law perspective, was the issue of aborting a child. She aborted children in
their eighth and a half month. 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.
And that hope did in fact cause a lot of her patients to heal.
God was good to me. By a miracle every one of these women recovered and was able to work
which, at least for awhile, saved her life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you look at how health care providers tried to help these people whose bodies were
being violated in such horrible ways, I think you get to the core of what being a health
care provider is about.
It's about how do we care for other people and how can we be compassionate toward them.
Try and help them as a person and not just as a patient.