Ruth Kluger, who wrote haunting Holocaust memoir, dies at 88
Ruth Kluger, whose unforgiving memoir of growing up Jewish in Nazi-occupied Vienna and escaping death in a concentration camp unsentimentally redefined the conventional mythos of the heroic Holocaust survivor, died Oct. 5 at her home in Irvine. She was 88.
The cause was complications of bladder cancer, said her sons Daniel and Percy Angress.
Published in English in 2001 when she was about 70, “Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered” spared no one with its blunt and haunting narrative — not her cultured neighbors who stopped suppressing their latent anti- Semitism when Germany annexed Austria; her adult relatives who she believed should have foreseen the “final solution” for European Jews and fled the continent with their families; her liberators who swiftly wearied of hearing about the Holocaust; or even her tormented self.
“We survivors are not responsible for forgiveness,” she once told reporters in Austria. “I perceived resentment as an appropriate feeling for an injustice that can never be atoned for.”
She was 6 when the Nazis marched into Vienna. Her father fled to France, where he was deported and killed. Her stepbrother, who was six years older and whom she idolized, also was murdered. She and her mother labored in several concentration camps, where she survived by lying about her age and then by escaping from aforcedmarchorderedbytheir German guards as the war was ending.
Mother and daughter immigrated to America, where Kluger would ultimately become a professor of German literature, “impatient and absent-minded, prone to drop things intentionally or through clumsiness, even breakables like dishes and love affairs; a woman who is perennially on the move, changing jobs and homes at the drop of a hat and inventing reasons afterward while she is packing; a person who runs away as soon as she gets nervous, long before she smells danger.
“Because running away was the best thing I ever did, ever do,” she wrote. “You feel alive when you run away. It’s the ultimate drug, in my experience.”
Her memoir recounted a symbiotic but tense relationship with her often depressed mother and generational conflicts over strategy and survival.
“There were good reasons my mother lost her mind,” Kluger said in an interview with the German magazine Spiegel in 2006.
“Still Alive” distinguished itself in the Holocaust canon on several counts: Kluger did not reflexively equate mere survival with a happy ending to her horror story, and her narrative through a woman’s experience and feminist perspective was unconventional.
“It is wise, witty, blunt, brutally honest and unsentimental, and as moving as only the naked personal truth, and its bold, razorsharp analysis, can be,” was how Kluger’s book was described by The Guardian. “She doesn’t insist on being right, but she does insist on being heard.”
A Washington Post reviewer called it “an act not of running away but of confrontation, of facing her past head- on and allowing no rationalization or romanticization of it.”
The New York Times review criticized the author’s “outdated feminism” and said her troubled relationship with her mother “clouds much of the narrative of this otherwise stark, moving book.”
Ruth Susan Kluger was born Oct. 30, 1931, in Vienna to Dr. Viktor Kluger, a gynecologist, and Alma (Gredinger) Kluger, a homemaker with a son from an earlier marriage.
After the German annexation in March 1938, Jews were barred from public schools. Ruth’s father was allowed to treat only Jewish patients and was imprisoned for illegally performing an abortion on a destitute non-jew who had pleaded with him for help.
After he was released and fled to France, she often wondered why he left without his family.
“‘Are you so ignorant that you have to ask that?’” a cousin told her years later. “‘ Who would have thought then that children and women were in danger?’ My father was in danger, so he had to go.”
As a child she might have been repatriated to Britain, but her mother insisted on remaining in Vienna until 1942, she wrote, when they were transported, first to
Theresienstadt, the model camp exhibited to Red Cross inspectors, and later to Auschwitz-birkenau and Christianstadt.
Begrudgingly accepting her mother’s advice, which also was validated by another prisoner working as a clerk, she gave her age to the guards as 15 instead of 12, which qualified her for forced labor instead of extermination.
As the war was ending, she remembered her mother telling the first American soldier they encountered that they had escaped from a concentration camp.
“His gesture was unmistakable, she wrote. “He put his hands over his ears and turned away. My mother translated. He had had his fill of people who claimed they had been in the camps.”
Her marriage in 1953 to Werner Angress, who taught European history, ended in divorce. In addition to her sons, she is survived by four grandchildren.