Englisch
A Chapter from Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered [2001]
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Ruth Klüger (Mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Photographin Monika Zucht) |
Odyssey is the right description of Ruth Klüger’s childhood. We know about it from her 1992 memoir of her childhood experiences in several concentration and death camps during World War II, among them Auschwitz. This book, weiter leben, was written in German and was widely read in Germany; it is regarded today as one of the most impressive and touching accounts of Jewish victims of the Holocaust system. — Years later, in 2001, Klüger produced a new version of weiter leben in English, entitled Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.
It is this version that our in-class reading of the chapter “Death Camp” was based upon.
Klüger was born in Vienna in 1931 and, after her liberation, moved to the United States in 1947. In her forties, she became a professor of German Literature at the University of California, Irvine and at Princeton University.
In her autobiographical reflection Klüger is searching for an answer to the question why she, a girl of merely 11 years, was able to survive while so many others did not. Was it fate or just sheer luck? Ultimately, she arrives at the conclusion that statistics has usurped the place formerly occupied by the tragic twins, fate and necessity. Nothing can “elevate” the fact of her survival by giving it a higher meaning, nothing can explain it by reference to personal merit or achievement—survival did not “mean” anything, it just happened. She writes: “Auschwitz was as foreign to me as the moon. Auschwitz was a lunatic terra incognita, the memory of which is like a bullet lodged in the soul where no surgery can reach it. Auschwitz was merely a gruesome accident.”
Class 12 d (and Dr. Michael Knittel, English Teacher)
