At age 16, Gisella Perl had graduated first in her secondary-school class, the only woman and the only Jew. She asked her father to send her to medical school, but he refused at first, fearing that she might forget her faith. But Perl was determined, assuring her father she would remain observant. Her father relented, and Perl went on to gain her degree in medicine and establish a practice in Berlin.
When the National Socialist party rose to power in 1933, Jewish doctors were stripped of their positions and purged from universities and government. Perl and her husband, Ephraim Krauss, and their two children returned to their native Hungary, where she became a beloved doctor. Life was peaceful, for a while. Perl remembered evenings listening to her son play violin, in their home near the Carpathian Mountains. That halcyon time ended when Germany invaded in March, 1944.
Dr. Perl and most of her family were rounded up and sent to the Sighet Ghetto. A few months later they, along with 400,000…More