Her father, Maurice Perl, refused to allow her to study medicine at first, because he feared she was going to "lose her faith and break away from Judaism".

She married an internist, Dr. Ephraim Krauss,[2] and practiced until 1944, when Nazi Germany occupied her hometown during its invasion of Hungary and deported Perl to the Auschwitz concentration camp along with her family.

Josef Mengele gave her the task to work as a gynecologist within the women's camp, attending to inmates without bare necessities such as antiseptics, clean wipes, or running water.

New York Representative Sol Bloom unsuccessfully petitioned the Justice Department for permanent residency of the United States.

In June 1948, Gisella Perl published the story of her incarceration at Auschwitz, detailing the horrors she encountered as an inmate gynecologist.

The book was titled I Was a Doctor in Auschwitz and included Perl's description of operations on young women's breasts without anesthetics, using a knife as her only instrument.

[9] Perl's account of the treatments was virtually identical in every detail to the court testimony of Dr. Olga Sulima, an inmate physician at Auschwitz from the Soviet Union, according to historian Bernard Braxton.