Customer Reviews

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

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3 star:		(1)
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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.

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.

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.

The author doesn't simply recount fact and opinion, she has truly analyzed her childhood growing up in Vienna and then through the Holocaust and concentration camp. What a treasure we have in this book to document one girl's life, living through a horrific time in history. It is a bonus that the author is such an outstanding writer. Kluger allows the reader to relate to her life through their own life experiences. She is certainly someone I'd like to know better. Highly recommend.

Ruth Kluger gives a remarkably lucid and thoughtful account of her experiences as WWII Austria, and eventually the concentration and forced labor camps of Germany. Even though English is not her first language, Kluger writes remarkably succinct and cogent English prose, and she confronts the moral and emotional complexity of the holocaust in her memory. "Still Alive" is loosely structured, as Kluger prefers to record the events as she recalls them as opposed to adhering to strict chronology, but the result is very interesting, she superimposes her thoughts and secrets as the horrible events unfold. She paints a vivid and, at times unusual portrait of the Nazi holocaust, often ruminating on the pain and humiliation (she wonders if her father trampled children when sentenced to the gas chamber), but also the sheer enormity of the camps as an historical event, she recalls that when she received her tattoo she felt glee because she realized that she was a part of something that was much larger than herself, something "worth witnessing." A third of the memoir is post-holocaust, Kluger recounts her experiences in New York after the war as she and her mother struggle to regain control of their lives, and look for possible meaning and redemption in their past-suffering.

Reading *Still Alive* was like having a conversation with someone I like and admire. A one-sided conversation, one might say, since Kluger was doing all the talking, and I was contributing nothing but my interpretation of her words. But Kluger answered many of the questions I would have asked, had she been sitting across from me. "What was it like after you escaped, when you were thrown in with Germans who were running from the approaching Allies? Did you talk to them?" I would have asked. "For them," she would have said, "it was despair, they were leaving behind everything; while for me, it was joy, because I was gaining everything -- the rest of my life." (I am not quoting the exact words from the book here, but writing the general idea from memory). "Did the culture's attitude toward you as a woman make it more difficult to recover from the humiliation you suffered as a camp inmate?" "What was it like to go from being a very private child, to being crammed into a mass of other humans?" "How was your relationship with your mother after the war, after you grew up?" "What was it like going to a strange place, having to learn a new language, a new culture?" "How could you tolerate life as a U.S. housewife in the 1950's? Of course it was far better than life in the camps, but still ..."

Kluger's personality comes across as irrepressible. Her book inspires me rather than depressing me. For example, having described her childhood compulsion to memorize poetry early in the book, Kluger mentions composing poems about the camps with (not so appropriate) catchy rhythms and rhymes, because it made them easier to memorize, and of course she had to commit them to memory since paper and writing implements were scarce, and anyhow, how else could one be sure of holding onto them? I smile as I remember that. Even as she starved for food and water, she found a way to create treasures that no one could take away from her, as long as she lived.

I have to confess that I do not read German, so I would not be able to appreciate Dr. Kluger's literary criticism. I am sad that she has not published more poetry and observations of life.

I chose Kluger's book for a book club selection and was not disappointed. This arresting memoir documents, unflinchingly, a childhood of brutality and hope. It does so in an unapologetic manner. Kluger does not want sympathy; she merely wants to be able to tell her personal history and a different point of view. Many of her anecdotes are downright controversial, a plus for book club discussions. For example, she challenges the notion that Nazi women were as cruel as their male counterparts, and she questions whether the bond between she and her mother would have survived if forced to choose between their lives. My only reservation is it gets off to a slow start, but Still Alive is brilliant in the end.

Could not lay the book down until finished. How did we let non-humans run the world?