Ably translated, this is an extraordinary Holocaust memoir wherein
a young Czech woman undergoes a dizzying variety of hellish
experiences. Published in association with the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum, this volume is a clinic on the varieties of
torture that one could undergo as a Jew during the Nazi period.
Young Ruth was steeled for loss early in life as a child of
divorced parents. This girl who enjoyed music and skiing soon found
herself in a long line of Jews delivering all valuables (especially
money, jewelry, musical instruments, and radios) to the new Gestapo
authorities. The family managed to hide out on a farm with gentiles
for many months, but their resources ran out and the Gestapo closed
in, forcing the family to the camp Theresienstadt, where conditions
were occasionally livable thanks to periodic visits by the Red
Cross. But inmates suffered all the more when their meager calorie
allotment dropped back to starvation level. To her credit, young
Ruth volunteered as a nurse, even though her duties required more
removal of corpses than relieving anyone's suffering. While
bedridden herself with fever, she married her ghetto policeman
boyfriend. Elias, soon pregnant, was then transferred to Auschwitz,
where pregnancy was a certain death sentence. Her attending
physician turned out to be none other than the notorious Dr. Josef
Mengele, who spared her life because he wanted to see how long an
unfed baby could live. The most pathetic lines in this moving
memoir are a soliloquy by this young mother who must kill her
newborn for a chance of survival: "My child . . . you can't even
whimper anymore." Elias is ultimately tapped for forced labor,
allowing her to survive to see the Third Reich crumble and
eventually begin a family in Palestine. Because of the variety of
the author's experiences and the power of their expression here, if
you could only read one Holocaust memoir - this should be the one.
(Kirkus Reviews)
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
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