Still Alive

Still Alive (2001) written by Ruth Klüger, is a memoir of her experiences growing up in Nazi-occupied Vienna and later in the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt. However, as it's written by Klüger as a 70-year-old woman, the memoir goes beyond her experience as an inmate, chronicling her escape from Christianstadt's death march with her mother and adopted sister, Susi. The narrative ends not only with their self-liberation, or even with the general liberation by Allied forces, but goes beyond to her life as a post-war refugee. She outlines for the reader the difficulties she experienced in migrating to America, as well as the challenges and culture shock she faced as a foreigner trying to obtain an education and a place in society. Klüger resists narrating her story for the reason that she does not want her audience to derive a moral from the Holocaust as a whole. She defends her view, saying (of her time at Auschwitz), "[y]ou learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance." This undermining perspective appears often in the form of interjected philosophical asides. It is difficult to map out a story arc in the memoir because of Klüger's tangential commentary as she recounts the events in her life. She writes chronologically, but often disrupts her narrative with her own internal dialogue, ranging from statements such as "[the camps] weren't good for anything" to pondering the facts of her own story, confessing, "This story moves in circles, and the more of it I tell, the less of it makes sense."