Ella Lingens, Auschwitz Physician: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of the Testimonies of a “Righteous Gentile”

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Abstract

Ella Lingens, an Austrian non-Jewish physician was named Righteous Among the Nations in 1980 by Yad Vashem for sheltering Jews and spiriting them to safety. She was imprisoned in Auschwitz from February 1943 to December 1944 and then in a subcamp of Dachau until her liberation in April 1945 . She was forced to work in the infirmary in the women’s camp, in the subcamp Babice and the Dachau subcamp AGFA camera works. She narrated her experiences in several different ways, publishing a memoir in 1948, testifying in court in 1964, giving an Oral History interview in 1974 and having her son edit and republish her book in 2003. Several excellent studies have taken a longitudinal view of the way a survivor works through their experiences. However, these studies tend to take a single disciplinary perspective through the eyes of one scholar. Our approach is different, not trying to find unity in variety or to impose a single form of reading and listening but allowing the contrasts between our perspectives to become part of our inquiry and to explore the insights that arise from this interdisciplinary practice. We, two historians, a translation expert, and a literature scholar, take equal roles in this conversation. In this roundtable, we draw from our distinct methodologies and disciplines to cross-fertilize one another’s approaches to Holocaust testimonies in general, and to one series of Holocaust testimonies in particular
Questions that we will address at this roundtable include:
1. What role do stories told by female medical personnel at concentration camps play in our understanding of gender and the Holocaust?
2. In comparing Ella Lingens testimonies to those of Jewish female medical practitioners in the camp, what might we learn about relations between Jewish and non-Jewish prisoner functionaries in the medical corps? How is her role as a non-Jewish resister reflected in her testimonies? What differences do changing audiences make?
3. To what extent, over the course of her testimonies in different periods and in different genres, does Ella Lingens come to assume the role of a “righteous gentile” in public discourse?

Sub Unit

• Holocaust Studies

Moderator

• Amy Simon, Michigan State University

Discussants

• Sheila Jelen, University of Chicago Divinity School

• Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh

• Christoph Thonfeld, Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site

• Peter Davies, University of Edinburgh, UK

Zoom Host

• Zoom Host 06