The Hippocratic Oath

S1, E1: Ruth Elias was seventeen when the Nazis invaded her native city of Moravska Ostrava, Czechoslovakia where her prosperous family had lived for generations. In April 1942, all were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Elias’s parents and sister were deported to Auschwitz and soon murdered, but she was able to remain behind by marrying her boyfriend. By the winter of 1943 she became pregnant, a grave danger since pregnant women were targeted for deportation and Nazi regulations made it impossible to secure an abortion. She was sent to Auschwitz in the Fall of 1943. Interned in the infamous Czech Family Camp in Section B II B at Birkenau, she lived only a few hundred meters from a gas chamber and crematorium complex. When her pregnancy was finally recognized, she was placed under the care of the infamous Josef Mengele, who subjected her to a most cruel medical ordeal, forcing Elias to make the hardest possible decision a mother could face.