Triumph of hope
Subtitle: from Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel
By: Ruth Elias ; translated from the German by Margot Bettauer Dembo.
Publisher: John Wiley
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
Subjects: Elias, Ruth, 1922-; Theresienstadt (Concentration camp); Auschwitz (Concentration camp); Jews -- Czech Republic -- Ostrava -- Biography.; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Personal narratives.; Holocaust survivors -- Israel -- Biography.; Immigrants -- Israel -- Biography.; Ostrava (Czech Republic) -- Biography.
Genres: Biography.; Personal narratives.
Description: Now available for the first time in English, this is the memoir of a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz while several months pregnant.

Ruth Elias, a young Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia, survived three years in the Nazi camps of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. In this haunting testimony, she relives the day-to-day conditions and horrific inhumane treatment of those years. She describes in painful detail how, having given birth in Auschwitz, she and her baby became part of a sadistic experiment personally conducted by the infamous SS physician Dr. Josef Mengele.

Triumph of Hope also vividly recounts the aftermath of imprisonment, the difficult adjustment to normal life after the war. Ruth Elias's story is a portrayal of the emotional and psychological state of life in chaotic postwar Europe: from the desperate, futile attempts to track down family and friends; to the unabated hostility of former neighbors; to the chilling indifference of those who knew nothing of the experience of the camps.

For Ruth, hope would have to take the difficult path to a new life in a new land: Israel, where new challenges, new obstacles awaited.