I’ve had to reference this book so many times for translations I’ve been working on, and every time I’d read an excerpt from it I thought “I really must read this whole thing at some point”—so I finally, and it didn’t disappoint.

This a brutally unsentimental account of Ruth Kluger’s childhood in pre-war Vienna; imprisonment in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and a subcamp of Gross-Rosen; escape from a death march, and subsequent life in the USA. When I say unsentimental, I mean really unsentimental. “The main characteristic of sentimentality is deception,” Kluger writes, “including self-deception: the inclination to see something other than what’s in front of you.” And elsewhere, writing of visitors to concentration camp memorials: “And so the visitor monitors his reactions, examines his emotions, admires his own sensibility, or in other words, turns sentimental. For sentimentality involves turning away from an ostensible object and towards the subject observer, that is, towards oneself. It means looking into a mirror instead of reality.”

I really appreciated the quite brutal tone of this memoir (brutal, but at times also often darkly funny, to wit: “Recipes for gefilte fish are no recipe for coping with the Holocaust”). Kluger makes no attempt to “find the good” in a situation or to search for some sort of redemption. There are simply the terrible facts of the ordeals she suffered during the war and then the hard facts of the life she had to build for herself afterwards. Even family is of no comfort; much of her family is dead, leaving Kluger with a mother she often can’t abide.

Nothing in this book is overwrought. Kluger often describes her experiences with a sense of cool reflection, perhaps stemming from the way she perceives the entire tragedy of the Shoah: “Even in those days I was struck by a thought which I confess has more of a hold on me than moral outrage about the great crime. It is the absurdity of the whole thing, the senselessness and waste of those murders and deportations which we call Holocaust…” Her sense of the ultimate absurdity of the situation results in a sometimes wry tone, not something you would necessarily expect in a work like this.

That’s not to say there’s no emotion here, however. Toward the end of the book, she beautifully describes being in college and finally, after many years of loneliness, meeting like-minded women who would become lifelong friends. And in the epilogue, when she recounts the end of her troubled and troublesome mother’s life, I found myself—for the first time while reading this book—with tears in my eyes. As Kluger herself admits at the very end, maybe there was some kind of redemption after all.

Further reading…