Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (The Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women's Series)

While Ruth Kluger's life trajectory shares certain features with other survivor stories, the way in which she narrates it-with deep intelligence, unblinking honesty and searing incisiveness, as well as the poet's facility for metaphor-puts STILL ALIVE apart. Her account avoids sentimentality and clichés; it eschews escapism and sanitizing as it unabashedly mines the depths of experience in extremis and brings to the surface a myriad of difficult truths. Attempting to please no one, Kluger's courageous voice demands uncommon rigor of her reader as she debunks a number of myths-of roots, for example, ("...running away was the best thing I ever did...."); the myth of the moral superiority of survivors and the hope that some good must have come from the camps, ("Auschwitz was no instructional institution....You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance"); the patriarchal myth and "old prejudice" that men will protect their women (whereas in reality the weakest were most exposed and often died abandoned and in misery). She dares heartbreaking speculations about her father's death and suggests that a "pornography of death" functioned in the camps.
Kluger is equally at home with the adult's capacity to analyze and the child's unerring eye for injustices, betrayals and humiliations as well as the inextinguishable nature of human desire. The story of her paranoid mother, who refused to release her to the safety of a Kindertransport, who as often as not gave unreliable guidance that nevertheless saved their lives at a crucial moment-the examination of this lifelong relationship becomes an exquisite and excruciating portrait of human connectedness in all its perplexities.
While the reader is compelled to agree with Kluger's insight that nothing good came of the concentration camps, and while one would wish for her a different past, STILL ALIVE is an unparalleled achievement that flies in the face of the murderers of Nazi Germany and of all brokers of hatred. One can only hope that her belief-that aside from love, reason constitutes the greatest good-is embraced by readers everywhere.

There are many excellent memoirs describing the Nazi death camps, but this one touched me in a way that no other book has.

My fiancé died in the World Trade Center, and this is really the only book that resonates with the deep, bitter grief I felt in that disaster's aftermath. I don't mean to compare 9/11 to the Shoah at all, but Kluger articulates many of the contradictory feelings and beliefs I myself have struggled with, including my frustration at being shaped by something that everyone knows about, but almost no one understands. I felt a shock of recognition when she complained about people visiting Auschwitz as a sentimental gesture, because I feel that same (totally irrational) discomfort about people visiting "Ground Zero". Though I have lived my life as an intellectual, Kluger spoke to the savage in me that still rails and howls at my loss.

This is oftentimes an angry, bitter book, but she mentions in passing that she has grandchildren, so I believe she found some measure of joy in her life after her internment. After my tragedy, I was forced to ask myself how someone who doesn't believe in life after death can go on in the face of the gruesome injustice of existence. I never really found an answer, but I kept on living, and I don't intend to stop anytime soon. I heard a lot of my journey in Kluger's voice as well, and I am exceedingly grateful that she wrote this book.

Although Ruth Gruber was but a young child in Vienna, Austria when the Nazis imposed their anti-Semitic laws, she remembers this childhood vividly. The uniqueness of the narrative results from her frankness in revealing her mother's emotional problems, which at first kept Ruth from avoiding the concentration camps by getting on a Kinder Transport, but in the end saved them both from death in Auschwitz. We had to wait until now to read this account because in order to protect her mother's feelings, Dr. Gruber refrained from publishing it in English until after her mother died. He mother lived to be ninety-seven years old.

In Still Alive, Ruth Kluger while avoiding sentimentality in her words is able to evoke strong feelings from her readers with her thoughtful analysis of her experiences in pre-war Vienna, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt. She also includes commentary on her experiences in dealing with those who had not been through the horrors of the Holocaust and concentration camps and sought to understand.

I have been reading personnal narratives of Holocaust survivors for a research paper, and this work was by far the most memorable and original of the recent works I have read. Her languages is precise. She has thought her ideas through carefully and is aware of her own contradictions in some places. This book has the ability to alter a reader's perspective on what it was like to survive the Holocaust and deal with the memories of the experience.

Having read the stellar reviews and being immersed in the genre, I certainly looked forward to Ms. Kluger's memoirs.

Without being too judgmental of Ms. Kluger, at the same time I suspect Ms. Kluger would prefer me to be honest. And my opinion may be colored because I recently read Clara's War, in my opinion one of the finest survival memoirs I have ever read.

There is no question that the author has put the full force of her intellect and personality in this book. She has strong opinions on a whole range of topics, and delves deeply into her difficult relations with schoolmates and teachers growing up, her mother, her relatives, her children, her ex-husband, his friends, colleagues, even her psychotherapist.

And that's the common theme running through this book -- she pretty much has difficult relations with everyone she meets. Whether intentional or not, Ms. Kluger comes off through the pages of this book as someone who is not entirely likable, who is very judgmental, critical, somewhat pretentious in terms of her academic standing, defensive, and who justifies at length a series of uncomfortable anecdotes in which she has difficulty with numerous disparate people, places, and events.

Because Ms. Kluger strongly denounces the "victimology" that has grown around the horrific events of the Holocaust, I am quite certain the author wants to be evaluated based on who she is, not what she went through (terribly) as a child. And I agree with many of her views and her perspective on man/woman relations, human suffering and various social issues.

Still, I was pleased to be done with the book.