Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

ISBN-13: 9781558614369 / Angielski / Miękka / 2003 / 216 str.

Ruth Kluger

Opis

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. 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.

O autorze

Ruth Klüger, 1931 in Wien geboren, wurde als Kind in die Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau und Christianstadt verschleppt. Nach Ausbruch und Flucht mit ihrer Mutter und Pflegeschwester emigrierte sie in die USA, studierte Germanistik und Anglistik und lebt als Literaturwissenschaftlerin in Irvine/Kalifornien - mit einem zweiten Wohnsitz in Göttingen. Mit ihrer ersten literarischen Veröffentlichung, 'weiter leben' fand Ruth Klüger überwältigendes Echo bei Kritik und Publikum. Auszeichnungen u.a.: Rauriser Literaturpreis, Grimmelshausen-Preis, Marie-Luise-Kaschnitz-Preis, Prix Mémoire de la Shoa, Preis der Frankfurter Anthologie, Thomas-Mann-Preis der Stadt Lübeck, Roswitha-Preis, Lessing-Preis des Freistaates Sachsen und Theodor Kramer Preis für Schreiben im Widerstand und im Exil.