Pregnancy and Childbirth in Auschwitz

“The camp was no maternity ward. It was only the antechamber to hell.”
Source: Lengyel Olga, Five Chimneys, Academy Chicago Publishers 1995, p. 116.

How was it possible that there were pregnant women in the camp? Due to the Nazi ideology every pregnant woman was sentenced to death upon arrival. Against the Nazi’s policy, there were women who succeeded in hiding their pregnancy during the selection or who were not yet aware that they were pregnant. But, their fate was cruel: in this world of death, there was an absolute prohibition against birth and the creation of new Jewish life. Women, whose pregnancy was discovered, (and this was, of course, inevitable), were condemned to death together with their newborn infants.
Sometimes this meant immediate death and sometimes a prolonged death in the framework of cruel “medical experiments.” But, in the end, it always meant death. In this situation, the women were faced with a horrible dilemma - the termination of the pregnancy or the “murder” of a newborn baby to save the mother’s life. Indeed, the “murder” of babies was a widespread practice in the camp, performed mainly by Jewish women doctors who devoted the period of their incarceration to saving the lives of the mothers. Clearly, this cruel dilemma would haunt those women who were saved at the price of the murder of their newborn.