About

Ruth Elias was a Jewish woman who was born Ruth Huppert in Moravian Ostrava on 6 October 1922. Her parents were Friedrich (Fritz) Huppert and Malvina Ringer. Elias had an older sister, Edith. After the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, she was sent to the Theresienstadt ghetto where she married and became pregnant. She was transported to Auschwitz concentration camp, where she disguised her pregnancy and later selected for transfer to a labor camp in Hamburg, Germany where she was discovered to be pregnant. An SS doctor had her transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp and then back to Auschwitz. When Dr. Josef Mengele discovered she was pregnant, he let her give birth just to see how long a baby could live without being fed. After a week, she injected her newborn baby girl with morphine, saving Ruth's life.