Adélai͏̈de Hautval

Adélaïde Haas Hautval (1 January 1906 – 17 October 1988) was a French physician and psychiatrist who resisted Nazi medical practices during the Holocaust. Arrested in 1942 after crossing the demarcation line without authorisation, she was interned in several camps, including Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, before being deported in January 1943 to Auschwitz concentration camp as part of the Convoi des 31000. At Auschwitz, Hautval provided medical care to Jewish prisoners and refused to participate in forced sterilisation experiments. She was later transferred to Ravensbrück, where she remained imprisoned until liberation in 1945.

After the war, she resumed her medical career and testified in the 1964 British libel trial Dering v Uris, offering crucial evidence concerning medical crimes at Auschwitz. In 1965, she was recognised by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for her moral courage and efforts to protect Jewish lives.

Early life Marthe Adélaïde Haas was born on 1 January 1906 in Le Hohwald, a village in the Alsace region of eastern France. She was the seventh and youngest child of Philippe Haas, a Protestant minister active in the region during the 1890s, and Sophie Lydie Kuntz, daughter of Jean-Hippolyte Kuntz, proprietor of the Grand Hotel Du Hohwald. In 1910 the family moved to Guebwiller. Known affectionately as "Heidi" in childhood, she later adopted the name "Hautval" in memory of her native village. She was raised in a devout Protestant family, and later attributed her moral opposition to Nazi persecution to her Christian convictions.

She studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg and specialised in psychiatry, training in various institutions across France and Switzerland. During the evacuation of Alsace in 1939, she was relocated to the Dordogne region with much of the local population. She continued her psychiatric work at the Lannemezan facility in the Hautes-Pyrénées.

While imprisoned in Bourges, Hautval was held alongside Jewish detainees and openly expressed solidarity with them, repeatedly defending them before the Gestapo. As an act of protest, she initially fashioned a makeshift yellow badge for herself; in response, the Gestapo forced her to wear an official yellow star and an armband identifying her as a "friend of the Jews". She was referred to by fellow prisoners as "the saint", according to later survivor testimony, for secretly providing medical aid to Jewish prisoners in her barracks, despite the risks involved.

Later in life, Hautval was diagnosed with Parkinson disease. She died by suicide in 1988.

Memorials

On 11 November 1991, a fountain and memorial stone known as the (The Haïdi Hautval Fountain) was erected in her birthplace of Le Hohwald. Its face bears the inscription ("Think and act according to the clear waters of your being") one of Adélaïde Hautval's favorite maxims.