Ruth Klüger was eleven years old when she was deported with her mother from Vienna to Theresienstadt in September 1942. They went on to Auschwitz-Birkenau in May 1944, where Ruth was selected for slave labour at Christianstadt, a satellite camp of Gross-Rosen. She was on the death march out of Christianstadt in February 1945, escaped during the chaos with her mother and a young Czech woman they had agreed to keep with them, and walked into the American zone in Bavaria in April. She was thirteen.
Her memoir, written in German under the title weiter leben, eine Jugend, was published in Germany in 1992. The English version, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, came out in 2001. The two books are different. Klüger refused to translate the German book directly into English. She wrote the English version herself, restructuring the material for a different readership. She had taught German literature at American universities for forty years and made the language switch with full awareness of what changes when you change languages.
Klüger was the daughter of a Vienna paediatrician who had been arrested for performing an abortion in the late 1930s and was deported in October 1941 to Riga, where he was murdered. Her older half-brother had been sent on the Kindertransport to Czechoslovakia and was later deported to Estonia and killed. The Vienna apartment was Aryanised. Ruth and her mother lived for two years in increasingly restricted conditions before their own deportation. Theresienstadt was the showpiece ghetto where the Reich permitted the Red Cross to inspect, and where the regime constructed the propaganda film The Führer Gives a City to the Jews in summer 1944. Most of the people in the film were dead by Christmas, sent to Auschwitz on the autumn transports. Klüger and her mother were on one of those transports. She lied to the SS doctor on the ramp at Birkenau about her age, after a kapo whispered to her to say she was fifteen rather than twelve. The lie saved her life. She was selected for labour. The mothers and grandmothers and children sent to the other side were killed that day.
The book is the most uncompromising women’s memoir in the literature. Klüger refused to soften the material for German readers. She wrote about the antisemitism she had encountered in Austria and Germany after the war, including in the academic profession. She wrote about her difficult relationship with her mother, the woman whose decisions kept her alive and whom she could not, late in life, fully forgive for surviving alongside her. She wrote about the postwar reception in Germany, where the standard response to a survivor in the 1950s was discomfort, evasion and the unspoken wish that she would shut up and go away.
Klüger reached the United States in 1947. She studied at Hunter College and at Berkeley. She taught at Princeton, Virginia, Kansas, Cleveland and finally for many years at the University of California Irvine, where she ran the German department. She returned to Göttingen in 1988, was knocked off her bicycle there by a young driver and badly hurt, and wrote weiter leben in the long convalescence that followed. The book made her a major literary figure in Germany, decades after she had thought herself only an American academic. She received most of the major German literary prizes in the 1990s and 2000s.
She died in Irvine, California, on 6 October 2020, at the age of eighty eight. Her last book, Unterwegs verloren, Lost Along the Way, was published in 2008. The reading list of the women survivors who shaped the literature in English now starts with her.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards