The Female Doctors of Block 10 in Auschwitz: Gender, Resistance, and Survival

One of the most noteworthy yet little-known markers of what we would today call “Holocaust consciousness” in Britain in the 1960s was the Dering v. Uris libel trial, in which former Polish inmate-physician of Auschwitz, Władisław Dering, sued American author Leon Uris for libel for comments he made about the number of operations Dering had performed in Auschwitz in his novel Exodus. The trial, held at the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 1964, attracted a good deal of attention in the press. Not the least reason for this attention was the remarkable testimony given by three women who had been inmate-physicians in Auschwitz, albeit in very different circumstances to Dering: Dorota Lorska, Alina Brewda, and Adélaïde Hautval. This chapter analyzes their testimony in the context of the trial itself and asks what their cross-examination tells us about the state of knowledge about the Holocaust in Britain at this period. It then goes on to ask what we can learn from their writings prior to and following the trial, considering issues of gender, resistance, inmate society, and solidarity in Auschwitz, and the question—much debated in the 1960s thanks to the writings of Viktor Frankl and Bruno Bettelheim—of what facilitated survival.