(Jewish Group) Did Nazis make these Jewish women infertile?
In a TikTok that went viral this summer, a young woman asks her 93-year-old grandmother whether she got her menstrual period during the time she was in Auschwitz. “No,” says the grandmother, the telltale tattooed number visible on her arm, “because they put some kind of drug in the food we ate that made the period go away.”
The video by Miriam Ezagui, a registered nurse, has garnered more than 3 million likes and thousands of incredulous comments. “I would have thought it was due to malnourishment,” wrote one user, jenwimpfheimer. “There is no evidence of such a thing,” said another user. “Hunger deprived menstruation.” A third said the Museum of Auschwitz had denied these claims. “She is lying,” claimed a fourth.
Peggy J. Kleinplatz, a professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa, stumbled upon the video while finishing up years of research into the fertility problems faced by Holocaust survivors that was published in the September issue of the academic journal Social Science & Medicine. Ezagui’s grandmother, Lilly Malnik, told a story that echoed those of many of the survivors Kleinplatz had interviewed: that the Nazis had put some chemical into their rations that caused amenorrhea, the scientific term for loss of periods.
Many female survivors had told Kleinplatz the rations smelled and tasted repulsive. In 93 interviews with survivors or their children, Kleinplatz found that 20 were unable to have children after the war, and others reported multiple miscarriages and stillbirths or babies born prematurely; overall, they had a live birth rate of 1.46, compared to 2.6 to 2.9 among American Jews in the 1950s.
“The Nuremberg trial records showed that Nazis wanted to sterilize as many ‘Jewesses’ as possible without their knowledge,” Kleinplatz said in her article. “Something was happening to Jewish women during the Holocaust that was distinctive,” she added, “and nobody’s ever studied its long-term impact.”
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