LITERATURE + LECTURES

Holocaust Museum Houston presents  But I Wanted to Live: Interviews with Nurses and Physicians who assisted with the Medical Experiments in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück Concentration Camps, Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 6:30 PM - 7:45 PM, in the museum's Albert and Ethel Herzstein Theater.

Many prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps were forced to be victims of “medical” experiments, including various methods of sterilization, infliction of surgical wounds to simulate battlefield injuries and the testing of unproven therapies. In some instances, Jewish prisoners were assistants to Nazi physicians in conducting these experiments, and in other cases, civilian nurses and physicians took part in the experiments.

To seek an understanding of why these people participated, the degree of their willingness to participate, and their reflections on their actions, Dr. Susan Benedict (pictured) conducted in-depth interviews with two prisoner-nurses, one physician and two subjects of the experiments. In this free public lecture, Benedict will supplement the content of those interviews with documentation from depositions and post-war trials.

Benedict is a graduate of the University of Alabama in Birmingham with a doctor of science degree in nursing. She has taught in graduate programs of the University of Alabama, Columbia University in New York and the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, SC. In 1997, Benedict received a fellowship in medical ethics and the Holocaust from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to study the roles of nurses in the Nazi “euthanasia” program.

This lecture is cosponsored by UTHealth School of Nursing.