Ruth Elias

Ruth Elias was born in 1922 in Ostrava

Ruth Elias was born Ruth Huppert in Ostrava on 6 October 1922. Her parents were Friedrich (Fritz) Huppert and Malvina Ringer, and she had an older sister, Edith.

After Germany took over Czechoslovakia, she was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where she married and became pregnant. She was then sent to Auschwitz, where she hid her pregnancy. She was moved to a labor camp in Hamburg, then to Ravensbrück, and back to Auschwitz.

At Auschwitz, Josef Mengele let her give birth in order to see how long a baby could live without food. After a week, she gave her baby girl morphine, which saved her own life. Later, at the Taucha camp, she met Kurt, who became her husband.

After the war she moved to Israel and settled in Beit Yitzhak. Her memoir appeared in German in 1988, in Hebrew in 1990 and in English in 1998 as Triumph of Hope. She visited 17 German cities to speak with young Germans about the book.

In 2004 she spoke for the survivors at the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem. She died on 11 October 2008 in Beit Yitzhak.