What exactly did the Nazis do to her? (spoiler)
Anyone know?
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She was sterilised.
You stupid, clumsy labouring boy.
Actually, the film's doctor says she's perfectly healthy and may even be capable of childbearing. So he asks if she has "tried to have relations with a man". This is in a context of psychological trauma. Lisa's having been used as a human guinea pig by the SS surgeons has colored her self-image to the extent that she believes intercourse is "not possible", as she tells Jongman's mother. The film suggests otherwise, that perhaps if she attempts sex/marriage/childbearing, it could possibly work out.
shareI think it's clear they tried to sterilize her, and what a horrible scene: the pushy jackass doctor telling her humiliation isn't possible, prodding her to do something she wasn't comfortable with while lying under a sheet and having no female company at all, she might as well have been a *beep* corpse! Calling it a matter of feeling humiliated felt like trash too, try traumatizing, inhuman, painful, terrible! She was brutalized at a freaking Nazi camp, not pushed into a puddle. And I had thought a movie this old would have no triggers and be harmless; how wrong I was! As*hole men, at least two of them not caring about her feelings (that jerkoff policeman too).
shareThere was a nurse in the room with Lisa and the doctor...
I first thought they did the sterilization thing they were so infamous for, but when she spoke of it, it she referred to it as an anatomy lesson.
So what they did was numb her (she said she got a shot "in the back"), so an epidural, then because they were brutal Nazis who had no respect for the Jews as people, they just used her like a guinea pig (her words).
The Nazi doctors version of an anatomy lesson for all those young doctors was to simply get a Jewish woman, numb her up, and cut her open and let the "student doctors" look at all of her internal organs, most especially the reproductive tract evidently.
The banal brutality of it is what's horrific. They just cut her open like she was a corpse on the table, like medical students usually have for anatomy studies.
But in the Nazi world, they just used a young, healthy woman as their teaching "tool."
She made clear to the doctor that she really did not know what was what inside of her after that. And he told her he couldn't tell without more tests. But he gave her hope that it was not as bad inside her as she might have thought.
He did say she might be able to still have a personal life. He left that door ajar at least for her, pending further exams....
He seemed very familiar with the whole thing. He was apparently a Holocaust survivor himself.
The fiendish Nazis forced Lisa to watch Hitler's pornographic home movies--particularly those showing what Hitler liked to do with his niece. This gave the innocent Lisa a distorted view of sexual relations. Having no other frame of reference, Lisa came to believe that "sex" consisted entirely of the act Der Fuhrer liked to call "the Dusseldorf Steamer."
shareI still despise that scene, and any jerk who pushes a patient that way, unless he simply did X-rays. But my Christ, it's worse than I thought, what the Nazis did. I almost went numb reading that nightmare..
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