Ruth Klueger’s Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered is a powerful book that is difficult to describe. The work is divided into four sections and an epilogue. “Vienna” recounts Klueger’s early childhood in the city. “The Camps” discusses Klueger’s time spent as a twelve- and thirteen-year-old in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the labor camp at Gross-Rosen, and on a death march throughout Germany. “Germany” discusses time spent in the country after running away from the death march until Klueger’s emigration to America, while “New York” discusses Klueger’s experiences of immigration and, more generally, the rest of her life spent in America. The book is difficult to describe for a few reasons. First, the book covers nearly 70 years of experiences. While the impacts of the Holocaust are at their heart, the book covers a great deal more of Klueger’s life than simply her time spent in the camps. Relatedly, Klueger’s background as a poet shines in the ways that she destabilizes the chronological backbone of her narrative by interjecting things that happened long before or long after key events in question. In this way, I would describe Klueger’s work as more of a “meditation” than an exact chronological account.

“But a meditation on what?” remains the difficult question to answer. The answer seems to be the ambiguity and dilemmas surrounding a life after the Holocaust, expressed particularly through the themes of childhood and gender. On one hand, Klueger demands that the reader accept her childhood as just that, a childhood not unlike anyone else’s. On the other hand, Klueger reasserts the particularities of a childhood endured during the Holocaust and the ways it has transformed and continues to transform her life. For instance, Klueger recounts her hatred for an aunt who lived with them before the camps, because the aunt constantly told her to be more ladylike and punished her by taking away a collection of tram tickets she kept as a hobby. Although this aunt died in the Holocaust, Klueger says she still feels no real pity, just a lingering sense of outrage toward her aunt. This causes Klueger some distress, because of the "bad fit between facts and feelings, between actual, normal, petty sentiments and the horrendous suffering to which childhood is innocent." (33) Klueger's feelings are typical feelings for a slighted youth, but they cannot change or transform because of her aunt's demise in the unforeseeable Holocaust. What does one do with such feelings? As another example, Klueger contends her entire life with a mother who, among other mental problems, suffered from paranoia. While her mother’s harsh words and behavior hurt Klueger deeply, Klueger is clear that it might be that very paranoia that got both of them through the camps. How does one deal with the ambiguities surrounding these competing facts and emotions? Klueger does not provide clear answers to any of these questions. What she does do, however, is show the reader that Holocaust survivors (and perhaps people in general) must be understood within the full breadth of their experiences, which are complicated and convoluted. Holocaust survivors cannot be reduced only to their Holocaust experiences, but neither can the impact of the Holocaust on its survivors be denied or easily accounted for. Historians must be willing to face ambiguities, rather than search for easy answers.