The gassing was carried out in the detention cells of Block II. Protected by a gas-mask, I watched the killing myself. The Russians were ordered to undress in the anteroom; they then quietly entered the mortuary, for they had been told they were to be deloused. The doors were then sealed and the gas shaken down through the holes in the roof. I do not know how long this killing took. For a little while a humming sound could be heard. When the powder was thrown in, there were cries of "Gas!," then a great bellowing, and the trapped prisoners hurled themselves against both the doors. But the doors held. They were opened several hours later, so that the place might be aired. It was then that I saw, for the first time, gassed bodies in the mass.

The killing of these Russian prisoners-of-war did not cause me much concern at the time. The order had been given, and I had to carry it out. I must even admit that this gassing set my mind at rest, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to start soon and at that time neither Eichmann nor I was certain how these mass killings were to be carried out.

In the spring of 1942 the first transports of Jews, all earmarked for extermination, arrived from Upper Silesia.

It was most important that the whole business of arriving and undressing should take place in an atmosphere of the greatest possible calm. People reluctant to take off their clothes had to be helped by those of their companions who had already undressed, or by men of the Special Detachment.

Many of the women hid their babies among the piles of clothing. The men of the Special Detachment were particularly on the look-out for this, and would speak words of encouragement to the woman until they had persuaded her to take the child with her.

I noticed that women who either guessed or knew what awaited them nevertheless found the courage to joke with the children to encourage them, despite the mortal terror visible in their own eyes.

One woman approached me as she walked past and, pointing to her four children who were manfully helping the smallest ones over the rough ground, whispered: "How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?"

One old man, as he passed me, hissed: "Germany will pay a heavy penance for this mass murder of the Jews." His eyes glowed with hatred as he said this. Nevertheless he walked calmly into the gas-chamber.

On the way one of us was ordered to run to a post a little off the road and immediately after him went a round from a machine-gun. He was killed. Ten of his casual comrades were pulled out of the ranks and shot on the march with pistols on the ground of "collective responsibility" for the "escape", arranged by the SS-men themselves. The eleven were dragged along by straps tied to one leg. The dogs were teased with the bloody corpses and set onto them. All this to the accompaniment of laughter and jokes.

Conditions in all camps for foreign workers were extremely bad. They were greatly overcrowded. The diet was entirely inadequate. Only bad meat, such as horsemeat or meat which had been rejected by veterinarians as infected with tuberculosis germs, was passed out in these camps. Clothing, too, was altogether inadequate. Foreigners from the east worked and slept in the same clothing in which they arrived. Nearly all of them had to use their blankets as coats in cold and wet weather. Many had to to walk to work barefoot, even in winter. Tuberculosis was particularly prevalent. The TB rate was four times the normal rate. This was the result of inferior housing, poor food and an insufficient amount of it, and overwork.

We marched into the commercial heart of Auschwitz, warehouses of the body-snachers where hundreds of prisoners worked frantically to sort, segregate and classify the clothes and the food and the valuables of those whose bodies were still burning, whose ashes would soon be used as a fertilizer.

It was an incredible sight, an enormous rectangular yard with a watchtower at each corner and surrounded by barbed wire. There were several huge storerooms and a block of what seemed like offices with a square, open balcony at one corner. Yet what first struck me was a mountain of trunks, cases, rucksacks, kitbags and parcels stacked in the middle of the yard.

Nearby was another mountain, of blankets this time, fifty thousand of them, maybe one hundred thousand. I was so staggered by the sight of these twin peaks of personal possessions that I never thought at that moment where their owners might be. In fact I did not have much time to think, for every step brought some new shock.

At work we were Krupp's charges. SS guards were placed along the wall to prevent escape, but seldom interfered with the prisoners at work. This was the work of the various 'Meisters' and their assistants. The slightest mistake, a broken tool, a piece of scrap - things which occur every day in factories around the world - would provoke them. They would hit us, kick us, beat us with rubber hoses and iron bars. If they themselves did not want to bother with punishment, they would summon the Kapo and order him to give us twenty-five lashes. To this day I sleep on my stomach, a habit I acquired at Krupp because of the sores on my back from beating.

At Auschwitz the families were separated, those unable to work gassed, and the remainder singled out for conscription. The girls were shaved bald and tattooed with camp numbers. Their possessions, including clothing and shoes, were taken away and replaced by prison uniform and shoes. The dress was in one piece, made of grey material, with a red cross on the back and the yellow Jew-patch on the sleeve.

The crematorium contains a large hall, a gas chamber and a furnace. People are assembled in the hall, which holds 2,000. They have to undress and are given a piece of soap and a towel as if they were going to the baths. Then they are crowded into the gas chamber which is hermetically sealed. Several SS men in gas masks then pour into the gas chamber through three openings in the ceiling a preparation of the poison gas maga-cyclon. At the end of three minutes all the persons are dead. The dead bodies are then taken away in carts to the furnace to be burnt.

The German occupation forces imposed the same laws against the Jews that they had done in Germany: they made you wear the Jewish star, Jews were not allowed to go out in the street after seven or eight, and they started to round up people to send away. At that time we didn't know anything about concentration camps. We had no idea what was happening in Poland, in the east. They said they were sending people away to work; they would be in labor camps and get their rations there and wouldn't have to worry. In the beginning people actually volunteered because they had no money and the official rations were very small. To buy extra food on the black market was very expensive and they had no money. They thought that if they would go to work, they would get better food. After a while, we found out that those people who went voluntarily to these work camps never returned. So people stopped volunteering.

Then they started to round people up. They would take a block area, surround it with troops of the Wehrmacht, and they also had help from Belgian collaborators in the Rex Party. In one of those roundups, I was caught. They only wanted men at that time. They sent us by train to France to help build the Atlantic wall, a wall as thick as a house that went from Holland all the way through Belgium and France. They thought that the Allied invasion would come from that side.

It was very heavy work. The supervision of this camp was done by Organisation Todt. We had to build a fence around it ourselves. It was close to the beaches where they had to build defense positions. Our job was to carry water and cement. Sand they got from the beaches, but the cement we had to carry in cement bags. The sanitary conditions in that camp were very poorfor toilets we had to dig a huge ditch. I contracted typhoid fever there. The guards got afraid because of that. There were five of us who had typhoid fever. They then took us to a French hospital and put us up in the basement. That was the first time in weeks that we slept in a clean bed. In the beginning we couldn't eat because we had such high temperatures.

When we got better after a few weeks the guards showed up again and said, "We're sending you back to Belgium. You have to go back to the camp now." We did .go back to Belgium, but not back to the camp. They put us on regular passenger trains, with fifteen to twenty people in each compartment for eight, and brought us to Mechelen, which was an old army camp from World War I that the Germans used as an assembly point for all the Jews-men, women, and children-they had rounded up while we were in France. From there they added to our train another train with box cars, freight cars. This was the sixteenth transport from Mechelen. They gave us a card with a string to put around our neck, and we got a number-my number was 569. That was on October 31, 1942. There were 848 men, 94 women, and 41 children. Of the men, 54 returned. None of the women returned; none of the children returned. From 983, a total of 54 men returned.

When we got to Auschwitz, the train stopped and they opened up the cars. Everybody had to get out. Right away they separated the women and the children to one side and the men had to go to the other side. Then we saw some men trying to whisper to us who were working around the train with striped uniforms on and their hair shaved off. They were saying, "Walk!" We couldn't figure out what that meant, but we soon found out. The camp was a short distance away. Anyone who was tired or felt that he couldn't walk was to go to the other side and supposedly there would be trucks that would pick them up and bring them to the camp. The people that were able to walk were to march. We got the message and we lined up to march to the camp. The other people that could not walk, or didn't want to, we never saw again. They went straight to the gas chamber...

We had never heard of Auschwitz. We didn't know that a place like Auschwitz existed in 1942 at that time. They had said that there were shootings in Russia, in Ukraine where the Germans had advanced way back into Russia. There were rumors around in Belgium. We thought it was horrible, but we couldn't really believe it.

They did not just march us there to the camp and the gate with the large sign over it: "Arbeit macht frei". They forced us. They had these truncheons and they hit you over the head if you didn't walk fast enough. They brought us into a quarantine block. We went into the main camp. In Auschwitz they had brick barracks. Two floors, a ground floor that held about four hundred people and six hundred people upstairs. Then came the barbers and they shaved our hair off. Then they put numbers on our arm - I had number 72552. All that put us in shock because nobody would expect that. They took everything away from us. We got these pajama-like uniforms and wooden shoes like those Dutch shoes, very uncomfortable to work with. And then we got a big speech from a man who was in charge of the block. He said, "You are going to work here. This is a work camp. There is no escape from here. The only way you can get out of here is through the chimney." We didn't even understand what he meant by that.

The doctors of the hospital were sent for. The sight which greeted us when we entered Block VII is one never to be forgotten. From the cages along the walls about six hundred panic-stricken, trembling young women were looking at us with silent pleading in their eyes. The other hundred were lying on the ground, pale, faint, bleeding. Their pulse was almost inaudible, their breathing strained and deep rivers of blood were flowing around their bodies. Big, strong SS men were going from one to the other sticking tremendous needles into their veins and robbing their undernourished, emaciated bodies of their last drop of blood. The German army needed blood plasma! The guinea pigs of Auschwitz were just the people to furnish that plasma. Rassenschande or contamination with "inferior Jewish blood" was forgotten. We were too "inferior" to live, but not too inferior to keep the German army alive with our blood. Besides, nobody would know. The blood donors, along with the other prisoners of Auschwitz would never live to tell their tale. By the end of the war fat wheat would grow out of their ashes and the soap made of their bodies would be used to wash the laundry of the returning German heroes.

We were ordered to put these women back on their feet before they returned to camp so as to make place for others. What could we do without disinfectants, medicines, liquids? How could we replace the brutally stolen blood? All we had were words, encouragement, tenderness. And yet, under our care, these unfortunate creatures slowly returned to life and they even smiled when saying: "This is still better than the crematory."

Block VII was always full. Once it was the women with beautiful eyes who were told to come forward, once the women with beautiful hands. And the poor wretches always believed the stories they were told, came forward, and to the amusement of the SS henchmen gave their last drops of precious blood for the German soldiers who used the strength robbed from us to murder our friends, our relatives, our allies.

One of the basic Nazi aims was to demoralize, humiliate, ruin us, not only physically but also spiritually. They did everything in their power to push us into the bottomless depths of degradation. Their spies were constantly among us to keep them informed about every thought, every feeling, every reaction we had, and one never knew who was one of their agents.

There was only one law in Auschwitz - the law of the jungle - the law of self-preservation. Women who in their former lives were decent self-respecting human beings now stole, lied, spied, beat the others and - if necessary - killed them, in order to save their miserable lives. Stealing became an art, a virtue, something to be proud of. We called it "organization." Those who were working near the crematories had an opportunity to "organize" an occasional can of food, a pair of shoes, a dress, a cooking pot, a comb, which they then sold on the black market operating in the latrine for food, for special favors, and - if the buyers were men - for "love."

But among those who had no connections among the crematory workers there were many who "organized" the piece of bread of their neighbor, regardless of whether she might starve to death as a consequence, or "organized" their bedfellow's shoes, no matter if her bleeding feet would condemn her to be cremated. By stealing bread, shoes, water, you stole a life for yourself, even if it was at the expense of other lives. Only the strong, the cruel, the merciless survived. The SS were, of course, greatly amused by these practices and encouraged them by showing special favors to some, so as to awaken the jealousy, the hatred, the greed of the others.

Tomorrow Dr. Perl is to be honored at a luncheon given at the Helmsley Palace by the National Women's Division of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem. She now donates her time to the center's gynecological clinics.

But the past is never out of mind. She calls herself the Ambassador of the Six Million and talks of the past incessantly, in private conversation and in the speeches she gives to raise funds for the medical center.

''The greatest crime in Auschwitz was to be pregnant,'' she said in an interview the other day, recalling the edicts of Josef Mengele. The so-called doctor of death of Auschwitz performed savage medical experiments on prisoners, in particular, women, the physically handicapped and twins, and was in charge of deciding who would go to the gas chambers.

''Dr. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him,'' Dr. Perl said. ''He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. So women began to run directly to him, telling him, 'I am pregnant.' I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.''

She interrupted the pregnancies, she said, ''in the night, on a dirty floor, using only my dirty hands.'' ''Hundreds of times I had premature deliveries,'' she said. ''No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.''

But all of medicine was her province in the camp. As one of five doctors and four nurses chosen by Dr. Mengele to operate a hospital ward that had no beds, no bandages, no drugs and no instruments, she tended to every disease wrought by torture, starvation, filth, lice and rats, to every bone broken or head cracked open by beating. She performed surgery, without anesthesia, on women whose breasts had been lacerated by whips and become infected.

Dr. Perl had only one palliative: the spoken word. ''I treated patients with my voice, telling them beautiful stories, telling them that one day we would have birthdays again, that one day we would sing again. I didn't know when it was Rosh ha-Shanah, but I had a sense of it when the weather turned cool. So I made a party with the bread, margarine and dirty pieces of sausage we received for meals. I said tonight will be the New Year, tomorrow a better year will come.''

Dr. Perl was seized by the Gestapo along with her parents and husband in March 1944 and taken by cattle car from her hometown of Sighet (in what is now Rumania) to Auschwitz, in Poland. She was never to see them again, but the memory of her father, Maurice Perl, being led away, clutching a prayer book, remains vivid.

With Hungary serving as an ally of Germany throughout the war, the Jewish community was largely immune to the terrible fates of other Jews throughout Europe. In 1944, however, their false sense of security was brought to an abrupt halt as the Nazis began their rapid extermination plan. Spreading quickly throughout Hungary, the Nazis sent the bulk of the Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

As with many Jews across Hungary, Dr. Perl and her family were forced into a ghetto before being transported to Auschwitz in March 1944. After eight excruciating days packed tightly into cattle cars with almost no food or water, Dr. Perl's transport arrived at the gates of Auschwitz. As they entered into what, for many, would be their final resting place, families were separated into two lines: those going to the right were subjected to forced labor (about 3,000 people) while those going to the left were exterminated immediately in the gas chambers (7,000-9,000 people).