Pregnancy in the camps was a death sentence. The Auschwitz selection on the ramp sent any visibly pregnant woman to the gas chambers immediately. Inside the camp, a pregnancy that was discovered after arrival was usually grounds for the woman to be killed, often with the foetus or, in some cases, with the newly born infant. The few pregnancies that came to term inside the camps did so in extreme secrecy, with the help of women prisoners who were nurses or doctors, and the resulting babies almost never survived. The few that did survive lived because individual women in the camp made enormous personal risks to keep them alive.
The selection
The SS doctors on the ramp at Birkenau were trained to identify pregnancy in the rapid examination they conducted as deportees walked past. Visibly pregnant women were sent to the left, to the gas chambers, alongside mothers with young children. Women in the early stages of pregnancy who were not yet showing could pass through the selection and be admitted to the camp as labour prisoners. The SS recognised this and conducted, irregularly, a second examination of new arrivals at the disinfection block. Women found to be pregnant at this second examination were sent back to be gassed.
The result was that any woman who realised, after admission to the camp, that she was pregnant, faced an immediate and lethal problem. The pregnancy could not be revealed. Some women had abortions induced by camp doctors among the prisoners, often in conditions that were themselves life-threatening. Some hid the pregnancy as long as possible and continued to work, hoping to give birth in secret and find a way to save the baby.
The camp doctors
Several Jewish doctors held in the camp infirmaries became, in effect, abortion practitioners for the women prisoner population. The most-cited is Gisella Perl, a Hungarian gynaecologist deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Perl performed many abortions in the camp on women prisoners who came to her in secret. She used her bare hands and what implements she could improvise. She believed, as she wrote afterwards, that she had no other choice: a pregnancy that came to term meant the death of the mother and almost certainly the death of the child too. By terminating early, she could save the mother. Perl survived the war and wrote a memoir, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, in 1948. She had to argue with herself, in print and in private, about whether the work she did had been right or wrong; she generally concluded that the question of right and wrong did not apply in the camp.
The births
Some pregnancies could not be terminated and went to term inside the camp. The births took place in the women’s barracks, attended by other women prisoners, often without medical assistance. Almost all the babies born in this way were either killed by the SS on discovery or died of starvation in the first days of life. There are documented cases of babies being killed by the camp midwives themselves to save the mother, on the basis that the SS would otherwise kill both. There are also documented cases of babies smuggled out and hidden, almost never with success.
One particular practice in the women’s camp at Auschwitz was that some Jewish midwives, when delivering a baby they knew the SS would kill, would deliver the child stillborn by deliberate cord compression. The official record then showed a stillbirth and the mother was not killed. The Polish midwife Stanislawa Leszczynska, herself a prisoner, refused this practice. She is recorded as having delivered around 3,000 babies in the camp without ever causing the death of one of them. Almost all the babies died of camp conditions in any case. Some, born to non-Jewish mothers, survived. The babies born to Jewish mothers almost never did.
Sterilisation experiments
Pregnancy was also at the centre of the sterilisation experiments conducted at the camps. Carl Clauberg at Auschwitz and Horst Schumann at Auschwitz and Ravensbruck conducted experiments aimed at developing methods of mass non-surgical sterilisation that could be applied to populations the regime intended to eliminate without killing them. The intended subjects were Jews, Slavs, and Roma. Clauberg used caustic injections into the uterus to scar the fallopian tubes; Schumann used radiation. The experiments were conducted on prisoners. Many of the subjects died of the procedures. Many more were left permanently sterile. The fate of the women who survived these experiments was, in most cases, not survival of the camp itself, since they were generally killed when they were no longer useful to the experimenters. The few who survived to give testimony are part of the documentary record of these crimes.
The post-war record
The post-war literature on pregnancy in the camps is, like the literature on sexual violence, a recent development. Survivors did not, on the whole, speak about it for decades. The work of Gisella Perl and Stanislawa Leszczynska, both of whom wrote about their experiences in detail, is now part of the standard literature. The 1985 documentary Born Survivors tells the story of three women who gave birth in the last days of Mauthausen, in April 1945, with all three babies surviving by virtue of the camp being liberated days later. The book of the same title by Wendy Holden, published in 2015, brought the story to wider attention.
The babies who survived to liberation, born in the camps or born to mothers who survived deportation while pregnant, are sometimes called the youngest Holocaust survivors. They are now in their eighties. They have been gathering, in recent years, to record what their mothers told them.
Sources
- Gisella Perl, I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz, Lexington Books, 1948
- Wendy Holden, Born Survivors, HarperCollins, 2015
- Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel (eds), Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women During the Holocaust, Brandeis University Press, 2010
- USHMM: Women in the Holocaust