Adelaide Hautval
(1906-1988)
HAUTVAL, ADELAÏDE° (1906–1988), French psychiatrist and Righteous Among the Nations. Born in Hohwald (Bas Rhin), France, to a Protestant family, Hautval studied medicine in Strasbourg and after her qualification worked in several psychiatric wards. In April 1942, traveling to her mother's funeral, she was arrested trying to cross the demarcation line separating the two zones of France without a permit. Awaiting her trial in Bourges prison, she vehemently protested the harsh treatment of Jewish prisoners who were incarcerated there. The reply she received was, "As you wish to defend them, you will follow their fate." Sent to Auschwitz with a convoy of women prisoners, she arrived there in January 1943. She reportedly bore a sign, stitched on her overcoat, with the inscription: "A friend of the Jews." At Auschwitz, she helped hide a group of women afflicted with typhus and looked after them as best as she could. She was then asked by the SS garrison doctor, Eduard Wirths, to participate in the sterilization experiments practiced on the bodies of Jewish women in the infamous Block 10, which involved removing their ovaries either surgically or by means of radiation in order to produce sterility. Hautval told Wirths that she was completely opposed to these experiments. Wirths was surprised that she would object to a program whose ultimate purpose was the preservation of a superior race. Wirths asked her, "Cannot you see that these people are different from you?" and she answered him that there were several other people
Sources:Yad Vashem Archives M31–100; A. Hautval and H. Tennyson, "Who Shall live, Who Shall Die?" in: Intellectual Digest, Vol II, No. 7 (March 1972), 52–54; M. Hill and N. Williams, Auschwitz in England (1965); M. Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous (1993), 62–64; "Auschwitz in an English Court: The Dossier on Dr. Dering," in: World Jewry: Review of the World Jewish Congress, Vol. VII, No. 3 (May/June 1964); I. Gutman (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: France (2003), 298–99.
[Mordecai Paldiel (2nd ed.)]
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