Sari Siegel, PhD Candidate, History, University of Southern California, USA, SUMMER FELLOW
Ms. Siegel’s dissertation, entitled “Between Coercion and Resistance: Jewish Prisoner-Physicians in Nazi Camps, 1938-1945,” focuses on an important yet widely overlooked group in Holocaust history—Jewish inmates who utilized their medical knowledge in Nazi camps. To gain perspective on individual and general factors that influenced the prisoner-physicians’ conduct, she examines the evolution of their behavioral patterns between 1938 and 1945 in the labor, concentration, and extermination camp systems of the Greater German Reich. She draws particular attention to the dynamic natures of camp conditions and the prisoner-physicians’ strategies to save their own lives while attempting to uphold their Hippocratic promise to “do no harm.” Utilizing her skills in French, German, and Yiddish, she combines survivor testimonies and legal documents with contemporary government and organizational records for insight into how contextual variables and individual traits shaped the actions of these doctors in the camps. Since the prisoner-physicians’ medical activities placed them within survivor memoirist Primo Levi’s “gray zone,” analysis of their behavioral shifts allows Ms. Siegel to illuminate a new aspect of this morally ambiguous realm. She is working under the supervision of Prof. Wolf Gruner.
Ms. Siegel’s article “Treating Dr. Maximilian Samuel: A Case Study of an Auschwitz Prisoner-
Physician” will soon appear in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. She is the American recipient of the 2014 Institut für Zeitgeschichte-USHMM Exchange of Scholars Award, and she will spend six months in Vienna as a Junior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies.