Lucie Adelsberger

Lucie Adelsberger (1895–1971) was a specialist in pediatrics and internal medicine. At her own practice in Berlin, she mainly treated patients with allergic diseases. From 1927 to 1933 she worked at the Robert Koch Institute in their newly established unit to monitor hypersensitivity reactions. Then her permit to practice under the statutory health insurance companies and her license to practice medicine were terminated by the Nazis. Although she had been offered a job at the medical faculty of Harvard University, she stayed in Germany to take care of her sick mother and to continue treating her patients. In May 1943 she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was forced to work as a doctor to the prisoners in the “Gypsy and women’s camp” of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Shortly before the war ended, she was liberated from the external camp of Ravensbrück concentration camp. In 1946, Lucie Adelsberger emigrated to the USA, settling in New York, where she lived and worked as a doctor and carried out cancer research. Her memoirs, which describe her time in Auschwitz, are a moving document of the Holocaust.