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Rating: 
Summary: Witness to Goodness
Review: Although Ruth Gruber was but a young child in Vienna, Austria when the Nazis imposed their anti-Semitic laws, she remembers this childhood vividly. The uniqueness of the narrative results from her frankness in revealing her mother's emotional problems, which at first kept Ruth from avoiding the concentration camps by getting on a Kinder Transport, but in the end saved them both from death in Auschwitz. We had to wait until now to read this account because in order to protect her mother's feelings, Dr. Gruber refrained from publishing it in English until after her mother died. He mother lived to be ninety-seven years old.
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Summary: Thought provoking and original Holocaust memoir
Review: I chose Kluger's book for a book club selection and was not disappointed. This arresting memoir documents, unflinchingly, a childhood of brutality and hope. It does so in an unapologetic manner. Kluger does not want sympathy; she merely wants to be able to tell her personal history and a different point of view. Many of her anecdotes are downright controversial, a plus for book club discussions. For example, she challenges the notion that Nazi women were as cruel as their male counterparts, and she questions whether the bond between she and her mother would have survived if forced to choose between their lives. My only reservation is it gets off to a slow start, but Still Alive is brilliant in the end.
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Summary: Review of Still Alive
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book. It was written in a way that went through Ruth's life during the Holocaust years. It starts at the very beginning and just talks about her whole experience. I like how Ruth mixed in experiences and comments from the future. This showed how the Holocaust still impacts her life and what she thinks about her surroundings. No one will ever be able to understand what Ruth had to suffer while in the concentration camps. But I feel that by reading her life story it makes it seem more of a reality and brings to life aspects of how the Jews were treated during this time period in American history. All the hardship and discrimination that Ruth had to endure shows the power and willingness she had to live. I liked how she never said it was strength that le ther live rather it was mostly luck. I thought that reading this book made me feel greatful for everything that I have. I would recommend reading this book if you want to realize what life during the Holocaust was like.
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Summary: Review of Still Alive
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book. It was written in a way that went through Ruth's life during the Holocaust years. It starts at the very beginning and just talks about her whole experience. I like how Ruth mixed in experiences and comments from the future. This showed how the Holocaust still impacts her life and what she thinks about her surroundings. No one will ever be able to understand what Ruth had to suffer while in the concentration camps. But I feel that by reading her life story it makes it seem more of a reality and brings to life aspects of how the Jews were treated during this time period in American history. All the hardship and discrimination that Ruth had to endure shows the power and willingness she had to live. I liked how she never said it was strength that le ther live rather it was mostly luck. I thought that reading this book made me feel greatful for everything that I have. I would recommend reading this book if you want to realize what life during the Holocaust was like.
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Summary: fresh air
Review: I'm really impressed with Dr. Kluger, and this book has affected me greatly. I first heard Dr. Kluger on NPR (Terry Gross' "Fresh Air," I believe it was), and I was struck by her honesty and unpretentiousness (just like how Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered is). Even though she is a Jewish woman who was a child during WWII and I am a Korean American born a few generations later, we have a lot in common. Dr. Kluger mentioned on the show that she is an atheist who believes in spirits; I was happy to finally find someone who has the same beliefs! That made me want to read this book.Although I didn't have to go through anything as devastating as the Nazi concentration/labor/death camps, I could almost empathize with what Dr. Kluger was able to survive. Her book does not sentimentalize in the way that Schindler's List or even The Diary of Anne Frank seem to do. Although those two works were very well-done to say the least, I still didn't have a good idea of the individual's Holocaust experience until I read this memoir. I thank Dr. Kluger so much for sharing her life in such a straightforward, candid, and unique way. I really like the way she writes; as she did in her life, her prose seems to defy convention.
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Summary: A thoughtful and moving narrative
Review: In Still Alive, Ruth Kluger while avoiding sentimentality in her words is able to evoke strong feelings from her readers with her thoughtful analysis of her experiences in pre-war Vienna, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt. She also includes commentary on her experiences in dealing with those who had not been through the horrors of the Holocaust and concentration camps and sought to understand. I have been reading personnal narratives of Holocaust survivors for a research paper, and this work was by far the most memorable and original of the recent works I have read. Her languages is precise. She has thought her ideas through carefully and is aware of her own contradictions in some places. This book has the ability to alter a reader's perspective on what it was like to survive the Holocaust and deal with the memories of the experience.
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Summary: Outstanding Read
Review: The author doesn't simply recount fact and opinion, she has truly analyzed her childhood growing up in Vienna and then through the Holocaust and concentration camp. What a treasure we have in this book to document one girl's life, living through a horrific time in history. It is a bonus that the author is such an outstanding writer. Kluger allows the reader to relate to her life through their own life experiences. She is certainly someone I'd like to know better. Highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding Read
Review: The author doesn't simply recount fact and opinion, she has truly analyzed her childhood growing up in Vienna and then through the Holocaust and concentration camp. What a treasure we have in this book to document one girl's life, living through a horrific time in history. It is a bonus that the author is such an outstanding writer. Kluger allows the reader to relate to her life through their own life experiences. She is certainly someone I'd like to know better. Highly recommend.
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Summary: This book will survive
Review: There have been many, many memoirs about the Holocaust. So why read another one? Because it's one of the best, that's why. This author absolutely refuses to indulge in cliches. With her, you do not get anything that is familiar or comfortable. Nor do you get the dramatic emotion and catharsis that she rightly says belongs to the theater, not the concentration camps. Because she observes life sharply, and comments on it rationally, in fact is a rational voice in a profoundly irrational world, she forces the reader to view her as a person, and not the generic persecution-victim symbol, a view she detests... There are many times when her use of language is so striking that it's really worth rereading this, maybe several times. For example, when she discusses the opposing myths that the camps weren't all that bad vs. they were so terrible that the survivors were no longer human (p. 151). Then she says, "...". That really is how it goes and the perceptive reader will find many shocks of recognition here, and admire the person brave enough to drop the approved cliches and be honest.
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Summary: One of the outstanding Holocaust memoirs of recent years
Review: While Ruth Kluger's life trajectory shares certain features with other survivor stories, the way in which she narrates it-with deep intelligence, unblinking honesty and searing incisiveness, as well as the poet's facility for metaphor-puts STILL ALIVE apart. Her account avoids sentimentality and clichés; it eschews escapism and sanitizing as it unabashedly mines the depths of experience in extremis and brings to the surface a myriad of difficult truths. Attempting to please no one, Kluger's courageous voice demands uncommon rigor of her reader as she debunks a number of myths-of roots, for example, ("...running away was the best thing I ever did...."); the myth of the moral superiority of survivors and the hope that some good must have come from the camps, ("Auschwitz was no instructional institution....You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance"); the patriarchal myth and "old prejudice" that men will protect their women (whereas in reality the weakest were most exposed and often died abandoned and in misery). She dares heartbreaking speculations about her father's death and suggests that a "pornography of death" functioned in the camps.
Kluger is equally at home with the adult's capacity to analyze and the child's unerring eye for injustices, betrayals and humiliations as well as the inextinguishable nature of human desire. The story of her paranoid mother, who refused to release her to the safety of a Kindertransport, who as often as not gave unreliable guidance that nevertheless saved their lives at a crucial moment-the examination of this lifelong relationship becomes an exquisite and excruciating portrait of human connectedness in all its perplexities.
While the reader is compelled to agree with Kluger's insight that nothing good came of the concentration camps, and while one would wish for her a different past, STILL ALIVE is an unparalleled achievement that flies in the face of the murderers of Nazi Germany and of all brokers of hatred. One can only hope that her belief-that aside from love, reason constitutes the greatest good-is embraced by readers everywhere.
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