[Live on Zoom] Jewish Physicians and Medical Work in Nazi Camps and after Liberation

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar Fellowship Admission: Free Registration is required. Watch the video

Because of their specific knowledge and skills, doctors are valuable not only to their patients, but also to the larger systems in which they work. This was true of Jewish doctors assigned to medical work in Nazi camps during the Holocaust and the medical professionals tending to the health of fellow Holocaust survivors in the years after liberation. This lecture will examine the roles and circumstances of two doctors across two very different contexts. In doing so, it will shed light on two kinds of Nazi camps that have received minimal attention from scholars: collection camps in Munich and forced labor camps for Jews in Silesia. It will also draw attention to the seemingly surprising presence of working physicians in those locations, as well as the involvement of Jewish doctors in the medical treatment of DPs in postwar Germany. 

About the Speaker

Sari J. Siegel is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program in the History of Medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA. After she received her PhD in history from the University of Southern California for her dissertation "Between Coercion and Resistance: Jewish Prisoner-Physicians in Nazi Camps," Siegel was the 2018-2019 Geoffrey H. Hartman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. She has published several articles and presented her research on Jewish prisoner-physicians in seven countries, and she is currently working on a book manuscript. As the 2019-2020 Dina Abramowicz Emerging Scholar, she has embarked on a postdoctoral project studying Jewish DP-physicians and their provision of medical care to fellow survivors in DP camps and health facilities in the aftermath of the Holocaust.