Dr Adelaide Hautval

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One of the heroic individuals honored on Flickers of Light is Dr. Adelaide Hautval, a French physician and a Protestant who was arrested for illegally crossing the demarcation line dividing the two parts of France. While in jail awaiting trial, she vociferously protested the inhuman treatment of Jewish prisoners. Then, censured as a "friend of Jews", she was sent to Auschitwz where she refused to join a team of physicians that performed pseudo-medical experiments on young women. In fact, during her imprisonment, she vehemently fought for and supported the Jews by treating them with compassion, empathy, and words of encouragement. She applied her medical knowledge to help inmates that had contracted contagious diseases such as typhus, and she placed these unhealthy ones in a separate area to prevent diseases from spreading to the other people. As a camp doctor, she did not report the illnesses of the prisoners to save them from their imminent demise. Fearlessly, Dr. Hautval was never afraid to question authorities, and even after the war she testified in the well-known 1964 London trial Uris vs Dering, affirming that it was possible to disobey inhuman Nazi orders even in Auschwitz. Regarding Pastor Niemoller, if he were writing his poem about apathy and political indifference today, the groups I think he would include are all of those in our society who do not care about us, but hypocritically use us to pretend they do when they really fight for power and influence. As a matter of fact, this famous poem means that if you do not speak up against injustice for others because you think you are not one of them, then do not expect any help for yourself. The author knew what was happening was totally wrong but did not try to stop it; when it was his turn to suffer there was no one left but himself and so none to speak
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