Biography
Ruth Elias was a Holocaust survivor who appeared as herself in Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah (1985). Her extended interview, filmed in the late 1970s, formed the basis of one episode in the later companion series The Four Sisters (2018), released as "The Hippocratic Oath".
Born Ruth Huppert in 1922 in Moravian Ostrava, Czechoslovakia, she was deported to Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz. She survived experiments conducted by Josef Mengele and later immigrated to Israel. Elias recounted her experiences in the memoir Triumph of Hope.
She also appeared in other documentaries drawing on her testimony, including Mengele: The Final Account (1995) and Sorrow: The Nazi Legacy (1992). Elias died in 2008.
