Still Alive (2001) written by Ruth Klüger, is a memoir of her experiences growing up in Nazi-occupied Vienna and later in the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Christianstadt.
However, as it's written by Klüger as a 70-year-old woman, the memoir goes beyond her experience as an inmate, chronicling her escape from Christianstadt's death march with her mother and adopted sister, Susi.
She outlines for the reader the difficulties she experienced in migrating to America, as well as the challenges and culture shock she faced as a foreigner trying to obtain an education and a place in society.
"[2] A common recurring theme in the memoir is the element of irreconciliation between Klüger and her family members, the foremost presence in her life being that of her mother, since her father and brother were murdered during the Holocaust.
Though she argues that there are "no absolute means of salvation,"[5] she writes, "[m]y mother had reacted correctly to the extermination camp from the outset, that is, with the sure instinct of the paranoid...I think that people suffering from compulsive disorders, such as paranoia, had a better chance to pick their way out of mass destruction, because in Auschwitz they were finally in a place where the social order (or social chaos) had caught up with their delusions.
"[5] In the beginning of the memoir, Klüger recalls her inability to balance her memories of her father as a living entity and as a murder victim.
"[10] She ties her female-specific experience to a protestation of the barbarity of war in general, and Nazi methods in particular, decrying the unnatural stress that imprisonment can place on a person: "Everyone was so undernourished that no one menstruated.
She tenaciously traces these sexual predators' thought process back to male presumption: "From a patriarchal point of view, the mass rapes and gang rapes of German women that occurred in the Soviet occupied zone were an act of revenge, not necessarily just, but understandable, in view of the atrocities the German forces has committed in the Soviet Union.
"[11] Apart from this "substratum" of war memory,[11] Klüger made a less emotionally and politically charged observation that Jewish tradition only allowed male descendants to say Kaddish.
She speaks to her gentle repulsion from Judaism, saying, "[i]f it were different, if I could mourn my ghosts in some accepted public way, like saying kaddish for my father, I'd have a friendlier attitude towards this religion...