Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

In this provocative memoir, Ruth Kluger presents the story of a life fully lived against all odds. Taking us into the experience of the Holocaust as few writers have before, she offers one of the most powerful accounts of the dark heart of the twentieth century -- and of a reclaimed life beyond.

Swept up as a child in the events of the Nazi era, Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. At the age of seven, she found that she was no longer welcome to sit on the park benches of her beloved hometown; at eleven she was deported to the first in the series of concentration camps that would become the setting for her precarious coming-of-age.

Kluger witnessed an underworld of deprivation and death at Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt, the camps where she was interned along with her mother. Through a combination of defiant determination and inexplicable grace, the two survived and made a desperate flight to freedom. But their difficult journey would continue, and their conflicted relationship become more frayed, as they struggled to begin a new life in occupied Germany and later in New York City.

There Ruth faced the challenge of constructing an autonomous identity without betraying her past. Haunted by the ghosts of the dead, hemmed in by traditional Jewish culture, and confronting the limits placed on women in postwar America, she had to reach deep into her store of courage to establish her independence and find her voice.

Kluger's narrative of the war years and their aftermath is marked by the blunt, unsentimental observations of childhood. Her deft interweaving of these memories with philosophical and historical reflection yields a memoir that is emotionally gripping yet subtly argued and often wry. Rejecting all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal, Kluger summons our attention back to the particular reality, and responsibility, of each individual.

On publication in Germany, Still Alive sparked renewed discussion about the Holocaust. It has since been hailed across Europe as a literary masterwork. Published here in English for the first time, it presents a personal voice emerging through and against history. In her tale of survival, Kluger offers us a model of self-determination and tells of a passage to freedom achieved through fierce adherence to inner truth. As Johannes Rau, president of the Federal Republic of Germany, has said, Kluger's work shows that "the single, unique human being matters, always and in every situation, that every life is unlike every other life, unalterably and irrevocably."