Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

A controversial bestseller likened to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Still Alive is a harrowing and fiercely bittersweet Holocaust memoir of survival: "a book of breathtaking honesty and extraordinary insight" (Los Angeles Times). 

Swept 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. 

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.

Ruth Kluger (1931–2020) was a literary scholar, memoirist, and a professor emerita of German at the University of California, Irvine. She previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Virginia, and was a guest professor in Gottingen, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. As the author of five books of literary criticism, she also studied English literature, obtained a master’s degree in 1952, and a PhD in 1967. Dr. Kluger survived internment at Auschwitz, fleeing a death march in 1945, eventually immigrating to New York, and beginning her lifelong work in academia and writing. After an accident-related days-long coma, Dr. Kluger was moved to recall long-repressed memories of the war, which served as the impetus for her memoir, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.