I'm really impressed with Dr. Kluger, and this book has affected me greatly. I first heard Dr. Kluger on NPR (Terry Gross' "Fresh Air," I believe it was), and I was struck by her honesty and unpretentiousness (just like how Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered is). Even though she is a Jewish woman who was a child during WWII and I am a Korean American born a few generations later, we have a lot in common. Dr. Kluger mentioned on the show that she is an atheist who believes in spirits; I was happy to finally find someone who has the same beliefs! That made me want to read this book.

Although I didn't have to go through anything as devastating as the Nazi concentration/labor/death camps, I could almost empathize with what Dr. Kluger was able to survive. Her book does not sentimentalize in the way that Schindler's List or even The Diary of Anne Frank seem to do. Although those two works were very well-done to say the least, I still didn't have a good idea of the individual's Holocaust experience until I read this memoir. I thank Dr. Kluger so much for sharing her life in such a straightforward, candid, and unique way. I really like the way she writes; as she did in her life, her prose seems to defy convention.

There have been many, many memoirs about the Holocaust. So why read another one? Because it's one of the best, that's why. This author absolutely refuses to indulge in cliches. With her, you do not get anything that is familiar or comfortable. Nor do you get the dramatic emotion and catharsis that she rightly says belongs to the theater, not the concentration camps.

Because she observes life sharply, and comments on it rationally, in fact is a rational voice in a profoundly irrational world, she forces the reader to view her as a person, and not the generic persecution-victim symbol, a view she detests...

There are many times when her use of language is so striking that it's really worth rereading this, maybe several times. For example, when she discusses the opposing myths that the camps weren't all that bad vs. they were so terrible that the survivors were no longer human (p. 151). Then she says, "...". That really is how it goes and the perceptive reader will find many shocks of recognition here, and admire the person brave enough to drop the approved cliches and be honest.

In Still Alive, Ruth Kluger while avoiding sentimentality in her words is able to evoke strong feelings from her readers with her thoughtful analysis of her experiences in pre-war Vienna, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt. She also includes commentary on her experiences in dealing with those who had not been through the horrors of the Holocaust and concentration camps and sought to understand.

I have been reading personnal narratives of Holocaust survivors for a research paper, and this work was by far the most memorable and original of the recent works I have read. Her languages is precise. She has thought her ideas through carefully and is aware of her own contradictions in some places. This book has the ability to alter a reader's perspective on what it was like to survive the Holocaust and deal with the memories of the experience.

This is one of the finest examples of Jungian interpretation of the Bible. It combines contemporary Biblical criticism with profound psychological interpretation. Father and daughter analysts contribute two essays: Yehezikel Kluger's gives the book its title and Nomi Kluger-Nash writes from a more personal perspective about the figure of Naomi. Jungian interpretations are often wildly ahistorical, but the authors are familiar with a wide range of Biblical scholarship and can deal with the text in the original Hebrew. Their only fault is to retain too much of the outdated theories about pre-Biblical matriarchy, characteristic of Jungian works.

The Secret Ship is not written extremely well, but it does the job. It tells how hard the holocaust was to get out of. The best and most horifying parts of the book were the introduction and the epiloge. If you really, really want to, read the whole book. Otherwise just read those parts. I think that it is worth buying just for those parts. The body of the book is great for fourth graders. Even though I'm not exactly praising their book, I hold Kluger and Mann in extremely high respect.Thank you for doing this and helping people understand what really happened.