In 1944, Gisella Perl was one of the only Jewish female doctors in the city of Máramarossziget, Hungary — now Sighetu Marmaţiei, a city in Romania that borders Ukraine.
A well-known gynecologist, Perl was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp when the Nazis invaded Hungary that year. There, Dr. Josef Mengele, who was notoriously nicknamed “the Angel of Death,” assigned her to work as a doctor in the women’s camp, treating Jews and other inmates with hardly any tools, medicine or sterilization equipment.
Soon enough, Perl discovered that Mengele performed deadly experiments on the pregnant women in the camp. And so, using her medical skills, she provided clandestine abortions to many of these imprisoned women — saving hundreds of lives and risking her own.
Perl’s incredible, harrowing story was told in a 2003 Showtime movie, “Out of the Ashes.” And now, with abortion emerging as a major political issue on the newly revamped campaign trail, it is being newly retold on stage: Perl is the subject of “Mere Waters,” an off-Broadway show premiering at the SheNYC Arts Festival in New York on Sunday, August 4.
Written by Jewish playwright Jillian Blevins in the wake of the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the play’s title is a reference to the Jewish stance on abortion, a Talmudic source that states that a fetus is “mere water” before five weeks.
“This is a situation where abortion was unquestionably a heroic act and an act that was pro-life.”said Blevins. “I didn’t really have to change anything to make that true, but I really did want that to resonate in the play.”
Perl, known to her patients as “Gisi Doctor,” survived Auschwitz, only to learn that her husband, son, parents and extended family were murdered. She moved to New York City in 1947 and published a memoir, “I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz,” the following year.
”Dr. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him. He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. So women began to run directly to him, telling him, ‘I am pregnant,’” Perl told the New York Times in an interview in 1982. “I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.”
She continued: ”No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.”
Perl eventually reunited with her daughter, Gabriella — who was hidden with a non-Jewish family at the start of the war — in Israel in the late 1970s; she died in 1988 at age 81.
The New York Jewish Week caught up with Blevins, 40 — whose other works include “Space Laser, In Space!” inspired by the antisemitic conspiracy theory — to discuss her fascination with Perl, what inspired her to write the play, and why its plot is more uplifting than at first glance.
This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.
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When did you realize you wanted to tell Gisella Perl’s story?
It was the summer of 2022, right after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I had it in my mind that I wanted to write a play that contended with, or responded to, our reproductive rights being under threat in a really real way.
Also, at that time, I hadn’t yet written a play that engaged with my Judaism. I was reading all these tremendous plays from other playwrights that were really coming from this place of, “This is who I am, and this is where I come from.” I kind of avoided that, and I asked myself, “Why? Why am I doing that?” So I started researching Jewish historical figures and Gisella came up. I said to myself, “This is incredible, why have I never heard of this before?” That’s when I knew I had to write a play.
What was your research process like?
I read a bunch of articles online about her and was able to write out the first 30 pages of the play in just a few days while I was in Florida workshopping another play. When I came home, I tracked down “I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz,” which is out of print — I had to get a copy from an academic library and Xeroxed the whole thing and read it and marked it up and sat on it and digested it for a while. Usually when I research, I want to make sure I’m not too loyal to facts, so I always give myself some space after researching to let them get a little fuzzy because my goal is a good story, not a book report.
You said you hadn’t written something that engaged with your Judaism in a long time. What was it like to work on a Jewish project this year?
One of the beautiful things that the play did for me was remind me of my own spirituality. I have been a secular Jew, cultural Jew, for a very long time. I celebrate Jewish holidays with my kids, but I’m in an interfaith marriage and I don’t belong to a synagogue currently. But just doing the research for this play, and now listening to the clips from rehearsal of the prayers and how they’re arranged, really moved me. I’ve felt so re-engaged spiritually by asking questions and doing research, which, of course, is how you practice Judaism, is to ask questions and then read. It felt like I was practicing in a really authentic way for the first time in a long time.
How did you find the balance between making this play about abortion while setting it at a concentration camp during the Holocaust?
So many people don’t know that the Jewish position on abortion is pro-choice, unquestionably. [As a group, Jews are overwhelmingly pro-choice. According to Jewish law, a fetus attains the status of a full person only at birth, and abortion is permitted when continuing the pregnancy poses a threat to the life of the mother.] That’s something I really love about being Jewish. I don’t need to feel like that value is in conflict with where I come from. I feel my spirituality and my religion supports a value that I think is really important.
Originally, I wanted to make sure this felt like an abortion play as much or more than it felt like a Jewish play or Holocaust play. When I first read [Perl’s] story, I just thought, this is a parable of how abortion can be truly pro-life. This was a situation where, if she had not performed these abortions, the women and the unborn children would suffer so horrifically and then die anyway.
But now, I feel like it is really important that it is also a Holocaust play — it never would have occurred to me when I wrote the play that there would be so much Holocaust denial happening in the world when it comes out.
I don’t think it’s really possible to set a play in a concentration camp that accurately depicts the scope of the horror, so one thing I was really careful with was maintaining this really narrow focus on women and their experience with pregnancy in Auschwitz, because that’s something I had never even considered and it’s so much the focus of Gisella’s memoir. So in the play, they never leave the hospital room that Gisella works in — that’s where the entire play takes place. In part, it’s because I wanted the play to be really focused, and also because knowing what’s going on outside that room, but not having to see it, was very important to me. I didn’t want it to be trauma porn. I wanted to be really focused on survival and what one woman did that saved so many women’s lives in Auschwitz.
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Bonus question: What else should audiences know about “Mere Waters” before seeing it?
Some people, when they see “a Holocaust play about abortion,” they think it sounds really heavy. It’s intense and it contends with heavy issues, but the overwhelming feeling that we want everyone to come away with from the play is hope. There’s a lot of hope in the play. I have two characters that are prophetesses, Abigail and Hannah, who offer guidance to Gisella. I wrote them into the play for myself, because I couldn’t write 100 pages of unrelenting misery — I need some guidance and some help. So the prophetesses are Biblical, but they’re also your Jewish tantes. I wrote them thinking of my great aunts around the Shabbos table, bickering and talking fast and talking over each other, but also just being really loving and having this connection to the past. All of that is in those characters. I really do think they provide my character of Gisella, and hopefully they provide the audience with a lot of comfort and hope and sort of relief and belief. I want the audience to feel held by them and to know that not only in the play, but hopefully in the future, things are going to be all right.
“Mere Waters” is showing Aug. 4 and 5 at the SheNYC Arts Festival at The Connelly Theater (220 East 4th St.). Tickets are $35; a digital version is also available online August 13-20. Get details here.
