Triumph of Hope
From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel
-
- $27.99
Publisher Description
Triumph of Hope From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel
Now available in English, here is the award-winning and internationally acclaimed testament of a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant, where she was forced to confront perhaps the most agonizing choice ever imposed upon any woman, upon any human being, so that both she and her newborn infant should not die in a Nazi "medical" experiment personally conducted by the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. And just as vividly, Ruth Elias recounts the aftermath of her imprisonment, and the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited.
"One of the most powerful memoirs provided to us by a survivor." --Indiana Jewish Post and Opinion
"Well-written...not only provides a remarkably honest picture of the unspeakable reality of living in ghettos and slave-labor and death camps, but also what it meant to be Jewish in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s...This is one of the best Holocaust memoirs I have read." --Washington Jewish Week
"The understated tone of this memoir adds to the author's powerful re-creation of her life as a young Czechoslovak Jewish woman during the Holocaust." --Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The understated tone of this memoir adds to the author's powerful re-creation of her life as a young Czechoslovak Jewish woman during the Holocaust. After the 1939 German occupation of her country, Elias, with her father and sister (her parents were divorced), lived undercover in a Czech village until 1942, when they were betrayed and removed to the Theresienstadt ghetto. To avoid deportation to a concentration camp, Elias married her boyfriend, Koni, a member of the Jewish ghetto police. But the two were eventually sent to Auschwitz, where she tried to hide her pregnancy. Horrifyingly, the author describes how camp doctor Joseph Mengele allowed her to give birth, then conducted an experiment to determine how long it would take her newborn son to starve to death. Another prisoner helped Elias inject the baby with morphine on the sixth day. Also detailed is Elias's harsh struggle to survive until the end of the war. She subsequently separated from Koni, remarried and emigrated to Israel. Photos.
