Still Alive

A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

By: Ruth Kluger, Lore Segal - foreword

Narrated by: Natasha Soudek

A controversial best seller likened to Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, Still Alive is a harrowing and fiercely bittersweet Holocaust memoir of survival: "a book of breathtaking honesty and extraordinary insight" (Los Angeles Times).

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 11, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps that would become the setting for her precarious childhood.

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 that has little to do with conventional wisdom or morality tales.

©2001 Ruth Kluger; Foreword copyright 2001 by Lore Segal (P)2021 Tantor

Boring. Good writing, though.

Clever analogies, well-written. In fact, a hoot piece of literature. The only feelings she exhibited was her dislike of her mother

The reader makes the story come to life

This is the first holocaust story I’ve read from the perspective of someone who experienced the atrocities as a child. Not only was the story a great one, but the reader told it in a way that you can feel how it affected the author and changed her views on life and relationships.

traumatic & heartrending... :(

unbelievably long and hard to stick with but I finished it. very sorry for her mother's & her camp experience

Eloquent

Writing is clearly Klüger’s artistic calling. Very beautifully written from the perspective of her younger and present self. Unfortunately the narrator’s vocal fry made it hard for me to listen to.

Extraordinary story. Sublime narration

This audiobook was incredibly moving. The narrator did a very touching job connecting with kindness and empathy in the telling of horrific events. I don’t think I could have handled reading the book in print because of the intensity, but the narrator’s voice was an anchor and held my hand when it felt almost unbearable to go on, and so we got through. Extraordinary story, and brilliant casting. Thank you.