Hans Meyerhoff
A PARABLE OF SIMPLE HUMANITY
Once upon a time, in our time, on the twenty-first of January,
1948
anno Domini,
there appeared, in the pages of the printed digest of
news served regularly with our morning coffee and toast, a strange
story. The story ran as follows:
The House yesterday passed three bills which would permit
. and a
Roumanian woman doctor to remain in the United States... . "
The woman doctor is Dr.
G--
P--,
whose parents, husband, and son
were killed by the Germans. The House approved a bill granting her perma–
nent residence after its author, Representative Sol Bloom (D., N.Y.), outlined
her efforts on behalf of "simple humanity" as an enforced member of the
medical staff of the German Auschwitz concentra tion camp. "It was her duty
to report to the German authorities every morning the number of pregnant
women in the camp," he said. "These women were systematically put to death.
As soon as Dr.
P--
learned of what happened to these women, she went
through the camp every night and p erformed abortions on all the pregnant
women so that there would be none.. . . It is estimated that, in this way, she
saved the lives of more than 3000 women."
A woman doctor she was. And she came from Roumania. That
seems like a harmless beginning to a harmless story; but it was not
always so and it is not always so in our time and memory. For once
upon a time, but still in our time and memory, it was quite wrong for
a woman to be a doctor. It was disclosed by laws of nature and revealed
by divine decrees that it was right for a woman to be a worker in the
house and a bearer of children. It was wrong for her to be anything
else; for anything else was false to her nature and would destroy what
was believed to be the natural and divine foundations of families, socie–
ties, and nations. And learned men-men, not learned women, for it
was also false to a woman's nature to be learned- inscribed this truth
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