''The greatest crime in Auschwitz was to be pregnant,'' she said in an interview the other day, recalling the edicts of Josef Mengele. The so-called doctor of death of Auschwitz performed savage medical experiments on prisoners, in particular, women, the physically handicapped and twins, and was in charge of deciding who would go to the gas chambers. The Loss of Two Lives

''Dr. Mengele told me that it was my duty to report every pregnant woman to him,'' Dr. Perl said. ''He said that they would go to another camp for better nutrition, even for milk. So women began to run directly to him, telling him, 'I am pregnant.' I learned that they were all taken to the research block to be used as guinea pigs, and then two lives would be thrown into the crematorium. I decided that never again would there be a pregnant woman in Auschwitz.''

She interrupted the pregnancies, she said, ''in the night, on a dirty floor, using only my dirty hands.'' ''Hundreds of times I had premature deliveries,'' she said. ''No one will ever know what it meant to me to destroy those babies, but if I had not done it, both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.''

But all of medicine was her province in the camp. As one of five doctors and four nurses chosen by Dr. Mengele to operate a hospital ward that had no beds, no bandages, no drugs and no instruments, she tended to every disease wrought by torture, starvation, filth, lice and rats, to every bone broken or head cracked open by beating. She performed surgery, without anesthesia, on women whose breasts had been lacerated by whips and become infected.

Dr. Perl had only one palliative: the spoken word. ''I treated patients with my voice, telling them beautiful stories, telling them that one day we would have birthdays again, that one day we would sing again. I didn't know when it was Rosh ha-Shanah, but I had a sense of it when the weather turned cool. So I made a party with the bread, margarine and dirty pieces of sausage we received for meals. I said tonight will be the New Year, tomorrow a better year will come.''