Overview

Ruth Kluger is one of the child-survivors of the Holocaust. In 1942 at the age of 11, she was deported to the Nazi ""family camp"" Theresienstadt with her mother. They would move to two other camps before the war ended. This book is the story of Ruth's life. Of a childhood spent in the nazi camps and her refusal to forget the past as an adult in America. Not erasing a single detail, not even the inconvienient ones, she writes frankly about the troubled relationship with her mother even through their years of internment and her determination not to forgive and absolve the past.

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9780747568407

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Reviews

'This is a work of shocking revelation ... This book is a fascinating study of the way one child's life was ripped into shreds by the Shoah. It is as important as The Diary of Anne Frank - and equally unforgettable' Independent 'Brilliant ... it is wise, witty, blunt, brutally honest and unsentimental, and as moving as only the naked personal truth, and its bold razor-sharp analysis, can be' Guardian

Ruth Kluger, Professor Emerita at the University of California, Irvine, began to write this book in the late 1980s. She wrote it in German, at Gottingen, hoping that if it were published in Germany her mother, living in California, would neither read nor be hurt by it. Thanks to an officious friend this attempt to spare her mother failed but the author still refrained from rewriting her book in English until after her mother's death. Ruth Kluger and her mother suffered deportation from Vienna together and made each other suffer long after they had settled in America. This account of her life is painful to read and must have been agonising to recall, for Kluger bears witness with a fierce honesty, determined to set down even those events which felt too dreadful to describe. Her father and brother were victims of the Holocaust and as a little girl she herself was put on one of the last transports from Vienna and sent first to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. She says that she must be one of the youngest survivors of the death camp since children were usually murdered there. The story of how she and her mother were saved is memorable as are the sketches of life in Birkenau and their life in post-war Germany. Kluger calls herself 'anti authoritarian, skeptical, inclined to question and contradict' and the reader finds that every other paragraph issues a challenge. What useful purpose is served by preserving the camps as museums? Why should one assume that a Holocaust survivor would be merciful, since nothing generous could possibly be learned in the camps? She judges, provokes, looks for hidden motives and engages the reader in a one-sided argument, providing possible retorts and firmly dealing with them. A remarkable woman and a remarkable book. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Born in 1931, Ruth Kluger emigrated to America in 1947 where she is a distinguished professor of German. The author of five volumes of German literary criticism, Ruth Kluger is currently professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine.

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