Title: Triumph of hope
First published: 1998
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.
Subjects: Auschwitz (Concentration camp), Biography, Holocaust survivors, Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), Immigrants, Jews, Personal narratives, Theresienstadt (Concentration camp), Terezin (concentration camp), Jews, czech republic, Holocaust, jewish (1939-1945), personal narratives, Czech republic, biography
Places: Czech Republic, Israel, Ostrava, Ostrava (Czech Republic)
People: Ruth Elias (1922-)
LC classification: DS135.C97 E45313 1998