Alisz Seisser's pregnancy amid coerced secret termination

Alisz Seisser’s pregnancy becomes a measure of how Paul Doll converts command into intimate control. He arranges for a prisoner physician to terminate it, presents the intervention as routine, and watches the procedure from beginning to end. The episode’s force lies in the distance between that practical language and the circumstances around it: Alisz is a prisoner dependent on the man who has been sexually exploiting her, while the doctor’s cooperation is secured through bargaining and pressure.

Pregnancy and the power imbalance

Doll’s relationship with Alisz is neither equal nor freely negotiated. He describes their sexual encounters as necessary to preserve his dignity and self-respect, treating her gratitude and apparent responsiveness as compensation for the misery of his household. That is his account of the arrangement, not evidence of Alisz’s independent consent. In another passage, he characterizes her as someone who retreats as soon as he glowers. The pregnancy therefore develops within a relationship shaped by his authority and her vulnerability, rather than outside the camp’s coercive order.

Doll’s private justification becomes especially revealing when set beside his unease about Hannah Doll. He admits to fearing his wife and describes her changed appearance and sexuality as distressing to him. Alisz, by contrast, becomes a supposed counterweight to the conditions in the Doll Villa. The contrast shows how Doll makes women’s bodies serve his self-image: he casts Hannah as a source of anxiety and Alisz’s attention as reassurance, while his account leaves Alisz’s own wishes largely unheard.

His treatment of the pregnancy follows that same pattern. When Alisz is crouched on a stool, her hands slowly writhing in her lap, he orders her to stop moaning and assures her that the procedure is simple and routine. He speaks as if reassurance settles the matter. Yet the scene gives no comparable space to Alisz’s decision or to any meaningful choice she might have. His authority determines what will happen; his language presents that determination as ordinary care.

Arranging the termination

Doll says that he has spoken to the physician and describes the procedure as something she performs routinely. When Alisz points out that there are no women doctors there, he answers that there are hundreds of them among the prisoners. The exchange exposes the contradiction in his reassurance: the existence of women physicians does not make the intervention voluntary or remove the coercion of its setting. The doctor identified in the account is Miriam Luxemburg, a Polish-German prisoner who had worked for two years at the SS-Hygienic Institute.

The Institute’s medical appearance does not place its prisoner doctors outside the camp’s control. Luxemburg is one of several prisoner physicians permitted to perform laboratory work on bacteriology and experimental sera under close supervision. Doll first meets her there, then arranges their second meeting in a quiet stockroom in the Main Administrative Building. To secure her participation, he offers six bread rations, which she dismisses. He then provides cigarettes: an initial bag containing 800 Davidoffs, with another 400 to follow. Doll knows that Luxemburg intends to use this payment for her brother, who is struggling in a penal labor unit in the uranium mines beyond Fürstengrube.

The exchange is not simply payment for medical work. Doll also hints that the directive may be changed by orders from Berlin, presenting the possibility as conjecture. His words place the procedure under an administrative threat he can invoke, while Luxemburg’s brother’s situation gives the cigarette payment particular weight. The account does not specify what Luxemburg would have done without these inducements and pressure; it does show that Doll controls the terms of the request and uses resources valuable to her to obtain cooperation.

The procedure and Doll’s account

Doll’s explanation of what will happen shifts when Luxemburg corrects him. He assumes that Alisz will receive a preparation, perhaps one of the tube pills he has heard about. Luxemburg tells him that there are no such pills and names the procedure as dilation and curettage. That clinical precision punctures his confident, soothing manner: he can authorize the intervention, but his understanding of its method is second-hand and incomplete.

The scene is rendered through concrete preparations rather than any extended account of Alisz’s experience: a stool, a chemical toilet, and a cauldron of water heating on an office hotplate. Doll urges her to stop crying and calls it a clean termination, even suggesting she should celebrate it. The consoling vocabulary does not soften the power relation; it supplies a respectable-sounding cover for an intervention organized by the man who has control over her circumstances.

Doll had intended to leave once the procedure began. Instead, he stays while Luxemburg applies the cleansing solution and local anesthetic, proceeds with dilation using a speculum, and performs the curettage. He records that he feels no squeamishness. This admission matters because he had earlier presented himself as inhibited by the presence of a pregnant woman. Faced with Alisz’s distress and the physical reality of the procedure, the inhibition disappears; he remains not to provide care, but as an observer with the authority to arrange what is being done.

Aftermath and significance

Afterward, Doll asks Luxemburg how long it will take before Alisz is her old self again. That question reduces the aftermath to a timetable for her return to usefulness or familiar behavior, while the available account does not describe Alisz’s own recovery or tell whether she felt restored. Doll’s confidence that the matter is routine therefore remains his framing, not a demonstrated outcome.

Alisz’s later history is recorded separately: she contracted tuberculosis of the hip and was transferred in January 1944 to Theresienstadt. The narrative says there is a better-than-even chance that she survived the war, but it does not connect the illness to the termination. Her later fate offers no resolution to the scene itself; the account leaves the immediate physical and emotional consequences largely outside Doll’s narration.

The episode makes the gap between medical procedure and consent impossible to ignore. A prisoner physician supplies technical expertise, cigarettes stand in for compensation, a possible order from Berlin becomes leverage, and Doll’s command turns an intimate medical decision into something administered from above. His calm assurances and professed sensitivity do not counterbalance that structure. They are part of how he tells the story to himself, even as his actions reveal who has the power to decide.