Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel - Hardcover

Ruth Elias' magnificent memoir, an award-winning and internationally acclaimed testament, comes to America

"Simultaneously factual and breathtaking, Ruth Elias writes her incredible story into the reader's soul." —Buchmagazin

"Ruth Elias's book is admonition and indictment. It is a document that says more than all the well-meaning memorial speeches." —Hamburger Abendblatt

"Ruth Elias's report pierces like a stake in the heart of the reader." —Main-Post

"A 'horribly good book,' attests historian Michael Wolffsohn (author of Eternal Guilt), because it 'displays horror and nevertheless has a conciliatory effect.' But that is horribly false. For this woman appears to have assembled all the strength and courage of her years of silence in order once again to face the incomprehensible." —Sibylle Zehle in Die Zeit

"Complete horror... One can scarcely put down this book, and will be pursued by the images it evokes—images of omnipresent death." —NeueZ?rcher Zeitung

Now available for the first time in English, this is the internationally acclaimed memoir of a Jewish woman who was taken to Auschwitz, while several months pregnant. There 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.

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. In 1942, Ruth along with her sister and father were rounded up for "resettlement." In direct and simple language, she evokes the terror of those camps from which virtually no others of her family would emerge alive. 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 remarkable 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.

In her unsparing chronicle of the strength it took to survive the monstrous end of one world and the tumultuous beginnings of a new one, Ruth Elias speaks for the living and the dead with stunning directness and eloquence in a book to be treasured and remembered and shared.

RUTH ELIAS lives in Betl Yitzchak, Israel.