Out of the Ashes | |
---|---|
Genre | Drama |
Based on | I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz by Gisella Perl |
Screenplay by | Anne Meredith |
Directed by | Joseph Sargent |
Starring | Christine Lahti Beau Bridges Richard Crenna Bruce Davison Jonathan Cake Jolyon Baker |
Music by | Charles Bernstein |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
Production | |
Executive producers | Gerald W. Abrams Thomas Michael Donnelly Robert Halmi Jr. Marianne Moloney Edward, Duke of Edinburgh |
Producers | Lee Levinson Robertas Urbonas |
Cinematography | Donald M. Morgan |
Editor | Michael Brown |
Running time | 113 minutes |
Production companies | Ardent Productions Contenders Only Cypress Point Productions Lietuvos Kinostudija |
Original release | |
Network | Showtime |
Release | April 13, 2003 |
Out of the Ashes is a 2003 American made-for-television biographical drama film that was released by Showtime. It is a dramatization of the life of Holocaust concentration camp survivor Gisella Perl and is based on her book I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz . [1] [2] The film is dedicated to the memory of Richard Crenna, who died three months before it was released.
Gisella Perl, a Jewish-Hungarian gynecologist from Sighetul Marmatiei, Romania, testifies before an Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) review board consisting of three men. Perl is seeking to be granted citizenship after passing the New York State Medical Licensing Board examinations, wishing to begin practicing in New York. She recounts her early life when she aspired to be a doctor despite the admonishments of her father, her time practicing as a gynecologist before the German invasion, and her experiences as prisoner #25404, where she provided what medical care she could to fellow prisoners. Her most controversial actions included providing late-term abortions to pregnant women in order to save their lives. These pregnant women would otherwise have been killed immediately or subjected to the torture of horrific "medical" experiments.
Perl is accused of "colluding" with the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who directed experiments on pregnant female inmates at the Auschwitz concentration camp. As the review board questions her over several days, she becomes increasingly emotional and questions her own determination to survive, as well as her guilt at having lived while so many others did not. She testifies that despite her intention to keep herself and others alive, she unknowingly became part of the Nazi efforts to kill, but she held on to the hope that the lives of the women she saved would undermine the efforts of the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish race. After she is granted citizenship and begins to practice in New York, she gets a call to attend one of the women whose first baby she had aborted in the camp. She delivers the baby and sees her wish that the Jewish race will survive fulfilled. [3]
Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (Stammlager) in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' Final Solution to the Jewish question.
Josef Rudolf Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II at the Russian front and then at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, where he was nicknamed the "Angel of Death". He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
The Last Stage is a 1948 Polish historical drama film directed and co-written by Wanda Jakubowska, depicting her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. The film was one of the early cinematic efforts to describe the Holocaust. Jakubowska’s film influenced subsequent directors that dealt with the subject, including Alain Resnais, Gillo Pontecorvo and Steven Spielberg. In film criticism, it is often referred to as "the mother of all holocaust films".
Margot Elisabeth Dreschel, also spelled Drechsler, or Drexler, was a prison guard at Nazi concentration camps during World War II. For her role in the Holocaust, she was sentenced to death and hanged.
Holocaust (1978) is an American television miniseries which aired on NBC over four nights, from April 16 — April 20, 1978.
The Ovitz family was a family of Hungarian Jewish actors/traveling musicians originating from present Romania, who survived imprisonment at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. Most of them were dwarfs. They were the largest family of dwarfs ever recorded and were the largest family to enter Auschwitz and survive intact; the family of twelve ranged from a 15-month-old baby to a 58-year-old woman.
The Grey Zone is a 2001 American historical drama film written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino, and Daniel Benzali. It is based on the book Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account written by Dr. Miklós Nyiszli.
Eduard Wirths was the chief SS doctor (SS-Standortarzt) at the Auschwitz concentration camp from September 1942 to January 1945. Thus, Wirths had formal responsibility for everything undertaken by the nearly twenty SS doctors who worked in the medical sections of Auschwitz between 1942 and 1945.
Horst Schumann was an SS-Sturmbannführer (major) and medical doctor who conducted sterilization and castration experiments at Auschwitz and was particularly interested in the mass sterilization of Jews by means of X-rays.
Hans Wilhelm Münch, also known as The Good Man of Auschwitz, was a German Nazi Party member who worked as an SS physician during World War II at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1943 to 1945 in German occupied Poland. He was acquitted of war crimes at a 1947 trial in Kraków.
Miklós Nyiszli was a Hungarian prisoner of Jewish heritage at Auschwitz concentration camp. Nyiszli, his wife, and young daughter, were transported to Auschwitz in June 1944. Upon his arrival, Nyiszli volunteered as a forensic doctor and was sent to work at No. 12 barracks where he mainly performed autopsies. He was under the supervision of Josef Mengele, a Schutzstaffel officer and physician.
Eva Mozes Kor was a Romanian-born American survivor of the Holocaust. Along with her twin sister Miriam, Kor was subjected to human experimentation under the direction of SS Doctor Josef Mengele at the Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II. Her parents and two older sisters were killed in the gas chambers at Birkenau; only she and Miriam survived.
Gisella Perl was a Hungarian Jewish gynecologist deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944, where she helped hundreds of women, serving as an inmate gynecologist for them. She worked without the bare necessities for practicing medicine. Perl survived the Holocaust, emigrated to New York, and was one of the first women to publicize the Holocaust experience in English, in her 1948 memoir I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz. She became a specialist in infertility treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York and eventually moved with her daughter to live in Herzliya, Israel, where she died.
During the Holocaust, children were especially vulnerable to death under the Nazi regime. An estimated 1.5 million children, nearly all Jewish, were murdered during the Holocaust, either directly by or as a direct consequence of Nazi actions.
Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on prisoners by Nazi Germany in its concentration camps mainly between 1942 and 1945. There were 15,754 documented victims, of various nationalities and age groups, although the true number is believed to be more extensive. Many survived, with a quarter of documented victims being killed. Survivors generally experienced severe permanent injuries.
Five Chimneys, originally published 1946 in French as Souvenirs de l'au-delà, is the memoir of Olga Lengyel about her time as a prisoner in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.
Psalm 44 is a novel by Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš. The novel was written in 1960 and published in 1962, along with his novel The Attic, and tells the story of the last few hours of a woman and her child in a Nazi concentration camp, before they escape. In a narrative full of flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness passages, with elements derived from his own life, Kiš sketches the life of a Jewish woman who witnesses the Novi Sad raid, is deported to a Nazi camp where she gives birth to a boy, and escapes with the help of another woman. Months after the war's end she is reunited with her lover, a Jewish doctor who had assisted the Nazis in Joseph Mengele-style experiments.
Hadassa Bimko Rosensaft was a Polish holocaust survivor. She is credited with saving thousands of Holocaust victims.
Angela Orosz-Richt is a Holocaust survivor. Of several thousand babies born at the Auschwitz complex, she is one of the few who survived to liberation. Her testimony has led to the 21st century convictions of two former Nazis.
Sergio De Simone was a Neapolitan child victim of the Holocaust who was arrested with his Jewish family while summering in Rijeka. He was then deported to Germany, where he was subjected to human experimentation and subsequently murdered.