Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood RememberedSwept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Kluger's story of her years in the camps and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales. Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth. |
Contents
Going on Living | 9 |
VIENNA | 13 |
THE CAMPS | 61 |
GHETTO | 70 |
DEATH CAMP | 89 |
FORCED LABOR CAMP | 113 |
GERMANY | 133 |
ESCAPE | 135 |
A DEFEATED COUNTRY | 150 |
NEW YORK | 171 |
EPILOGUE | 203 |
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American anti-Semitic Auschwitz Auschwitz-Birkenau Austrian barracks belonged Birkenau child childhood Christianstadt concentration camp course Czech daughter dead death Deggendorf deported emigrate English escape face father fear feel felt friends gas chambers German ghetto ghosts girl grown-ups happened Hitler Hitler Youth Holocaust human husband Jewish Jews kind Kindertransport knew later learned Liselotte listen live look Martin Walser Maya Angelou meant memory mind mother murder Muselmänner museum Nazis never older once perhaps poems postwar prisoners question remember Ruth Kluger Schorschi seemed sense Shoah someone stay stood story Straubing sure Susi Tadeusz Borowski talk tell Theresienstadt thing thought told took transport tried turn victims Vienna W. B. Yeats W. H. Auden walk wanted woman women words York young