German original: Ruth Klüger. 1992. Weiter leben: Eine Jugend. 31. Auflage 2023. München: dtv.   284 pp.

When page numbers are given in the text below, they refer to the English translation of the text.

This book belongs to the genre of testimonies by Jewish people who survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz or another concentration camp. It is therefore similar to Margot Friedlander’s book “Try to Make Your Life.” A Jewish Girl in Hiding in Nazi Berlin. A Memoir. Both books were very successful in Germany. As of December 2023, Friedlander’s text has seen 16 printings, while Klüger’s book has been printed 31 times. Friedlander was captured in Berlin, Klüger in Vienna. Their writing styles are quite different. The former provides a straightforward narrative; the latter, who was a university professor of German literature in the United States, mixes her narrative with reflections and interpretations. Two other books in this series of book recommendations also deal with the Holocaust. Michael Frank’s One Hundred Saturdays tells the moving story of Stella Levi and the destruction of the Juderia of Rhodes, then part of Italy. Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a best-selling novel about her relatives, the Rabinovich family, who were sent from France to Auschwitz and murdered there.

Ruth Klüger (Americanized as Kluger) (1931 to 2020) was deported with her mother from Vienna to Theresienstadt, which was a ghetto, neither a labor nor an extermination camp. She stayed there from September 1942 to May 1944. It was only one month after her arrival in Auschwitz that her death seemed to be unavoidable. Yet, she got a chance of survival purely by chance, and with the help of a kind fellow prisoner who worked as a clerk for one of the two selecting SS officers. One day in June 1944, another “selection” was ordered for the transfer of prisoners from the extermination camp Auschwitz to the labor camp Birkenau. In this selection, prisoners who could work were separated from those who could not. At that time, Klüger was only 12 years old. But the minimum age for passing the selection was 15. As had to be expected, her mother passed, while her daughter, Ruth, was rejected. This would have meant death in the gas chambers. Her mother pleaded with her to try again, this time in the line leading to the second SS officer. And she should lie about her age. She tried. When she moved in the line, a young female prisoner-cum-clerk saw her, “she left her post, and almost within the hearing of her boss, she asked me quickly and quietly and with an unforgettable smile of her irregular teeth: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Thirteen,” I said, as planned. Fixing me intently, she whispered, ‘Tell him you are fifteen.’” She followed her advice. “‘She seems small,’ the master of life and death remarked. He sounded almost friendly, as if he was evaluating cows and calves. ‘But she is strong,’ the woman said, ‘look at the muscles in her legs. She can work.’ She didn’t know me, so why did she do it? He agreed—why not? She made a note of my number, and I had won an extension on life” (p. 125f.).

Klüger was in Christianstadt with other female prisoners from Auschwitz (there was a branch camp of the Groβ-Rosen concentration camp; after 1945, Polen acquired the town and called it Krzystkowice) when, in January 1945, the Russian forces were approaching. The camp was evacuated. The remaining prisoners were sent on one of the infamous “death marches.” One night in February, “we acted. On the second night we took off during the chaos of being herded into yet another container. It was again a village with barns…” (p. 155). “During the next minutes, as we six [she, her mother, three Czech woman, and Susi] ran down the street, away from the freezing, hungry prisoners and their enforced wait for shelter, we passed the barrier from the world of the camps into Germany … We were free—free to be hunted down if our luck should turn. But I remember the exuberance, the euphoria, of these moments” (p. 161).

The first American soldier they encountered was a disappointment, because he did not want to hear their story. He had heard too many of them already. “One thing, I figured, was certain: this war hadn’t been fought for our sake … The free world didn’t welcome us as brothers and sisters, long lost but found again, liberated from evil forces and now to be jubilantly included in the Family of Man. That was the picture my childish yearning had painted. In reality we were a burden, a social problem” (p. 180f.).

MHN

Nonthaburi, Thailand

25 Juli 2024