Still Alive

Book 23 of my 2018 Reading Challenge

Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered by Ruth Kluger

Summary (via Goodreads)
Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Ruth Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence systematically undermined and destroyed. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. Kluger's story of her years in the camps and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust.
Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal. Whether describing the abuse she met at her own mother's hand, the life-saving generosity of a woman SS aide in Auschwitz, the foibles and prejudices of Allied liberators, or the cold shoulder offered by her relatives when she and her mother arrived as refugees in New York, Kluger sees and names an unexpected reality which has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales.
Still Alive is a memoir of the pursuit of selfhood against all odds, a fiercely bittersweet coming-of-age story in which the protagonist must learn never to rely on comforting assumptions, but always to seek her own truth. 

My Opinion
This observation, "In 1950, in Texas, the shock of recognition at the menacing signs of segregation, from water fountains to toilets, was like a slap in the face, though not meant for me [a white woman]", was something that affected the author since that's how it started for her in Vienna - don't sit on that park bench, you can't swim in the pool, etc.  That's an interesting dynamic that I hadn't considered before - the United States were the rescuers, the "good guys", overseas while segregation was occurring in our own country.  

I wouldn't normally include such a long quote in my review space but she makes an excellent point that is better said directly from her instead of summarized by me: 
        
         "Now comes the problem of this survivor story, as of all such stories: we start writing because we want to tell about the great catastrophe. But since by definition the survivor is alive, the reader inevitably tends to separate, or deduct, this one life, which she has come to know, from the millions who remain anonymous. You feel, even if you don't think it: well, there is a happy ending after all.  You cannot deduct our three paltry lives from the sum of those who had no lives after the war. We who escaped do not belong to the community of those victims of survival, we belong with you, who weren't exposed to the genocidal danger, and we know that there is a black river between us and the true victims. Therefore this is not the story of a Holocaust victim and becomes less and less so as it nears the end. I was with them while they were alive, but now we are separated. I write in their memory, and yet my account unavoidably turns into some kind of triumph of life."

A Few Quotes from the Book
"The only good was what the Jews managed to make of it, the way they flooded this square kilometer of Czech soil with their voices, their intellect, their wit, their playfulness, their joy in dialogue. The good emanated from our sense of self. And I learned for the first time who we were, what we could be, this people to whom I belonged, or had to belong, according to our oppressors, and now wanted to belong. When I ask myself today how and why an unbeliever like me can call herself a Jew, one of several possible answers runs: "It's because of Theresienstadt. That is where I became a Jew."

"The world hadn't changed. Auschwitz had not been on a foreign planet, but part of what lay before us. Life had gone on without a hiccup. I pondered the incongruity of this apparent carefreeness existing in the same space as our transport. Our train, for all our temporary relief, was part of the camps, part of their independent and peculiar world within a world, while out there was Poland or Germany or Silesia, whatever its geographic name, home of the people we were passing, a place where they felt at ease."