She told Elias, 'I've made an oath of Hippocrates, and I must save lives.Your child can't live.but you're young and I must save you, and you will give this to your child because I can't.' Ruth describes how the woman calmly made the case for ending the dying child’s pain: 'I didn't want to, but she started to talk to me – into me. In response to Elias' desperate cries one night, an unidentified “woman doctor” secretly brought her a syringe filled with morphine.

4 After several brief work details, Elias was transported back to Auschwitz, where Mengele made her and her baby girl the subject of an experiment: how long would it take an infant to starve to death? In December of 1943, she was transported to the so-called 'Family Camp' at Birkenau. Just days after doctors in Theresienstadt had been ordered to stop performing all abortions, Elias discovered that she was pregnant. A native of Ostrava in the Moravia region of what is now the Czech Republic, Elias was deported to Theresienstadt in 1942. The featured excerpt from Ruth Elias' extended interview describes how a prisoner doctor working in the camp hospital responded to Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele's experimentation on pregnant women. 2 The outtakes of the film, however, contain many oral histories that reveal how women experienced persecution, suffering, and violence during the Holocaust. Although Lanzmann focused on recording survivors' perspectives, there is a noticeable lack of women's voices in the final cut of the film. 1 Unlike other filmmakers before him, Lanzmann refused to feature footage taken by perpetrators.

Claude Lanzmann's 1985 documentary film, Shoah, was groundbreaking for its use of survivor testimony and contemporary footage from sites of mass murder.

Triumph of Hope by Ruth Elias