Customer Reviews

Triumph of Hope: From Theresienstadt and Auschwitz to Israel

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I found this book not only an unbelievable book to read but also a book which I learnt a lot from. As I am learning about the Holocaust in school now, it was good to hear a personal story from the horses mouth(so to speak) of what actually happened. Often when you hear stories they are changed each time they are retold, like the game broken telephone. But when you read a book which was written by the person who was the actual survivor, you know it isn't going to be all distorted and something you can actually learn from. I am still unable to comprehend exactly how it all happened but it did so now we should make sure that the story of the Holocaust is told to the future Jewish and non-Jewish generations to come, to make sure it is never forgotten. Also to make sure Holocaust deniers don't convince people that the Holocaust never happened as they are very persuasive with their stupid lies. Unfortunatley one day we won't have any survivors left and that is why we need to educate the future which is my generation and the generations that follow. So I recommend if you haven't read this book to read it and if you have or once you finish, recommend it to everyone to read. Ruth Elias is not only a fabulous author but a fabulous and heroic person. She is someone we should all look up to.

Ruth Elias' moving memoir of surviving the Holocaust and then building a new life in Israel is a haunting reminder of how resilient the human spirit is. She survives Theresienstadt and Auschwitz after losing all her family to the Nazis. In her memoir's most unforgettable episode, she delivers a daughter in a dirty, makeshift bed at Auschwitz and becomes a subject in one of Joseph Mengele's most gruesome experiments. Her infant will satisfy Mengele's curiosity about the amount of time a newborn can survive without nourishment. Elias' breasts are bandaged so that she cannot breastfeed and the child she can't bear to name suffers horribly for six days. A fellow prisoner provides a morphine injection to put the baby out of its misery and Elias herself delivers the death dosage. This is powerful narrative from a woman who saw degradation and death and survived thanks to her will and her love of music. It's an interesting addition to the list of Holocaust memoirs and a remind! er that the dream of Eretz Israel helped people like Ruth Elias survive to tell the tale the Nazis wanted no one to hear. I only wish that Elias had added more about her early years in Israel to her narrative, but perhaps she's saving that for a sequel to her memoirs.

Ruth's journey into the world of hell and horror leaves one feeling riveted and emotionally drained. A real "must read"! I had the priviledge of meeting Ruth in Israel last summer and she is a remarkable woman.

I have read dozens of Holocaust memoirs, and although they are always touching and intense, none have caused me to feel such grief for the author as this one. I literally had to stop reading and bawl my eyes out for a good 10 minutes. This woman endured so much, and with such grace, that you cannot help but be invested in her story. Highly recommended.

I finished reading Triumph of Hope this morning, after starting it two days ago. I simply couldn't put it down. The author, Ruth Elias, is nothing less than extraordinary. The way that she expresses her memories, through her style of writing and description, helps us to get one step closer to understanding an experience, which we can never really comprehend, because we were not there. Mrs Elias's life is remarkable, and through reading her book I thoroughly believe that she is a genuinely lovely, kind and warm person. It is such a tragedy that the Jewish people of her generation went through turmoil and absolute hell. But through this book, Ruth's aims - to spread the message that the discrimination and racism they experienced should never be repeated - are being achieved when a single person reads her book. Her message is being spread over the world, and I am glad that i was able to read Triumph of Hope. I intend to share this book with my family and friends, so that they can read of such an incredible woman, and a generation of people who refused to give in. I sincerely recomend this book to anyone who is thinking of buying this, for themselves or for others.

This book really opened my eyes to the living HELL these Jewish people went through. We learn about it in school, but the schoolbooks just scratch the surface of the emotional and physical turmoil these people went through. I wanted to learn more about this period. And when I did it explained why there are some people who think that the Holocaust never happened. I think that they don't want to believe that a human being could do that to another person! They go into denial. I recommend this book to anyone and everyone who wants to learn more and can handle the very disturbing REAL events that happened to REAL people. Ruth Elias is a heroic person and I would LOVE to have the oppurtunity to meet her.

Triumph of Hope, takes the reader along with Mrs. Elias as she lives through her every day encounters. The pain and suffering, and also the humiliation that the Huppert family endures leaves one with a heavy heart. But the pressing memory that I have of this book, is the decision that Mrs. Elias was forced to make in order to save the life of her beautiful baby girl.

I have, through the miracle of google, just reconnected with my father's family. We always believed that they had all perished in the holocaust. Ruth Elias was my first cousin. This book is the greatest gift I have ever been given. It tells the wonders of the life my family had before the war and the horror of the Nazi's. My family lost everything to the Nazis. But there is a miracle in her survival. I cannot begin to comprehend how one would continue to wish to live. It is not just a triumph of hope but the triumph of the human spirit.

Holocaust statistics are both well known (although the story of "Bishop" Williamson reminds us that the fight against Holocaust denial is never over), and sometimes incapable of helping us understand in a deeper sense what happened. Personal stories, when well told, help us come at least somewhat closer to comprehending the incomprehensible. Ruth Elias has written her story, which even among such stories must rate as one of the worst, with a sober clarity and directness that make it all the more effective. We also get a good sense of how difficult the struggle afterward was. And yet she was able to build a strong, constructive family life in spite of, and even incorporating, her experiences. I am grateful to Ruth Elias for having shared this story.
Guido Smit, Toronto

This memoir goes to show that, despite what some people might say, it really is true that no two Shoah memoirs and experiences are exactly alike. Rutinko Huppner (now Ruth Elias) grew up in a rather wealthy family in the former Czechoslovakia, and after her young mother divorced her father when she was 6 years old, Rutinko and her older sister Edith were raised by a single father, with help from their uncle Hugo (their father's brother) and his wife Irma, along with a whole slew of grandparents and other aunts and uncles. Later on their father remarried, though Ruth and her sister, teenagers by then, really resented their stepmother and tried everything they could to make her life miserable. Being wealthy, Rutinko and Edith had access to things that their friends, neighbors, and classmates could only dream about, such as sausage for school lunch, a car, being driven to and from school, vacations in the mountains, musical instruments and music lessons, and a lot of other great stuff. They even had the money and connections to get permission and papers to leave Czechoslovakia for England after the Nazi takeover in 1939, though she and her sister decided not to go through with it due to their father's ill health and wanting the family to stay together through this difficult time.

The family were able to go into hiding in a few different cities, where they enjoyed a relatively secure and happy life. Ruth and Edith even found the time to have romances and to be active in a secret Jewish youth group. However, there was eventually a raid on the area, and Ruth, Edith, their father and stepmother, and their aunt Irma were taken away to Theresienstadt (Terezin). Their uncle Hugo wasn't taken because he was very sick in the hospital and dying of cancer. Once in the large ghetto, they found themselves separated from their father, since men and women were quartered separately. However, shortly before they arrived, Ruth's boyfriend Koni and his own family had been deported, and this relationship ended up saving her life, since if Koni hadn't married her while she was sick in the hospital, she would have been deported along with the rest of her family when they were. From this point on out Ruth was along but for the friends she made, and she and Koni weren't even able to properly live together as husband and wife for some time. However, even in the ghetto love blossomed, and eventually Ruth discovered she was pregnant. After doing absolutely everything to try to find a doctor who would give her an abortion, she ended up being deported when she was two months pregnant, and was one of the few women who survived in that condition instead of being murdered on arrival. A lot of circumstances came together to save her life and to keep her alive even in spite of her condition, many of them decisions she had only a split second to make if she wanted to live. Eventually she had to make the most difficult and heartrending decision of all when her baby was born, so that the infamous "Dr." Mengele wouldn't kill them both.

Once she was no longer pregnant, Ruth was viewed as a healthy fit young worker, and was transferred, along with her friend Berta, who had also been pregnant, to Taucha, a subcamp of Buchenwald. In this camp, they were put into a special privileged work detail, which accounted for their eventual survival. After being liberated, their group of Czechs made their way home and found that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, their loved ones just were not coming home and that they'd had to start over again from scratch. I was surprised to learn that many young people like Ruth and her boyfriend Kurt just lived together after the war instead of getting married, since they had to wait two years before their missing spouses could legally be considered dead, even though everyone knew what had most likely befallen them. Ruth also had to make the difficult decision to divorce her husband, who had survived as well, because they'd just grown apart and she felt he hadn't acted very appropriately towards her when they were in the Family Camp at Auschwitz. A few relatives came back, but no one from her immediate family. It was with this new family of two that she left Czechoslovakia for Israel shortly after independence was declared, and just in the nick of time, before the Czech borders became closed.

Mrs. Elias went through some of the worst things imaginable (a number of times she even writes about how hard it was to just almost matter-of-factly type such heavy words like "None survived" or "They were probably all gassed"), and yet she came through everything alive and determined to start again, to make a new life for herself in her own homeland, to make sure that no one ever looked down on her or abused her ever again. It just goes to show that the human spirit is an amazing thing.