Ruth Klüger is a Jewish woman that survived the Holocaust. Most stories that are told and repeated are those written by men, but Klüger is proof that women did survive the horrors. Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered follows her during the ghettoization of her Austrian home, her trip to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz, and finally to Christianstadt. Unlike other Holocaust memoirs like Night and Survival in Auschwitz, Still Alive does not end when the Holocaust does. Still Alive follows Klüger through liberation and to America.

Klüger’s memoir is the most introspective look at surviving the Holocaust and what that means that I have read. Klüger initially remarks about everyone’s first impression when a woman has escaped from something so terrible. Did she have to sell herself? Was she raped? They are taboo subjects in our culture and because of them, Klüger argues, it is more difficult for a woman to tell her story. The truth is she did not have to do any of these things but she still seems to find herself running into the questions.

Klüger’s story can be extremely difficult to follow at times because she constantly jumps back and forth between the present and the past. The story is written almost to show how each event affects her even today. The problem is that the style becomes disorienting and the effect becomes lost on the reader in an attempt to decipher exactly what is being read. The opening few pages are among the most confusing in the book and even after a few read throughs I was not entirely sure what was going on.

Still Alive is written extremely well, but it does not really make up for the structure problems that can make it difficult to read. The vocabulary Klüger uses is expansive and effective, but keeping the story on a coherent timeline does not seem to be her forte. It could be argued that the blurred lines are symbolic, but symbolism is no excuse for poor writing. The writing is not my biggest issue with this book though.

It cannot be argued that the entirety of Still Alive has an alternative agenda; however, it does seem that there is a fairly sizable portion that does. Throughout the book it can be seen that Klüger is making a very overt feminist argument. There is nothing inherently wrong with her writing about feminism, but she is using the Holocaust as a backdrop for the argument. It is unacceptable to use the Holocaust as a springboard for any ulterior motive; it is insensitive and insulting to those who were not lucky enough to be able to tell their own stories.

Still Alive makes Ruth Klüger seem like a bitter woman, even in her childhood, and she can hardly be blamed for having such a bleak outlook. Everything she went through is more than anyone can understand. She even comments in the book saying that the flaw that people fail to see is that nothing good came out of the Holocaust. It did not bring people together and it did not make people more ethical or idealistic. If anything it tore people down to a baseness that seems to have been arguably inhuman.

Final Verdict:
Still Alive is actually a very interesting book. There are many things that make this book worth picking up and analyzing or just reading it for the sake of reading it. There are many dynamics within the book that make it of literary worth, but I cannot recommend this book on the basis of my belief that it has an ulterior motive.

Anyone interested in a look at a female point of view through the Holocaust would probably find this book interesting. It has some intriguing concepts that should be analyzed, but again I cannot bring myself to recommending this book.

Favorite Quotation:
Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps.