Landscapes of Memory: a Holocaust girlhood remembered, by Ruth Kluger
A childhood ripped apart by the Holocaust
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Your support makes all the difference.Ruth Kluger has won two major prizes for this book, and it is easy to see why. This is a work of shocking revelation, not so much about Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, but as an acute self-analysis simultaneously rooted in past and present.
Kluger painfully describes her "shabby, shameful" childhood in the prison of post-Anschluss Vienna, where Nazi boys sing about Jewish blood spurting from their knives. No Jewish child is allowed to swim, ride a bike, skate or go to the cinema. There is a wonderful moment of resistance when, in 1940, Kluger defies the law and removes her yellow star so she can watch Snow White. In the cinema, the baker's daughter, a 19-year-old Nazi, threatens to denounce her. Kluger does not miss the irony: "The story of Snow White can be reduced to one question. Who is allowed to live in the king's palace and who is the outsider?"
Kluger is conscious of myths that inform our psyche, and how such myths resonate for her story. She remembers the Viennese legend of Drunken August, who falls into the pit of plague bodies but escapes with a hangover. Her own situation is different. Hitler's Austria escapes with little damage, but Europe's Jews are devastated to this day.
What is most original here is the clarity of a child's point of view mixed with an adult's mature analysis. In primary school, Christian girls are cutting out paper swastikas as their Jewish classmates are thrown out: Kluger vividly depicts a vicious Nazi Vienna that hated its Jewish children.
Not only is she at war with the Nazis; she is also critical of her position in the Jewish family. At Passover, as the youngest child, she feels entitled to ask the magic questions at the Seder table. She has not yet learnt that girls do not participate, and that a woman's voice is forbidden in the synagogue. I admire her critique of Jewish ritual and her demands for equality: "Recipes for gefilte fish are no recipe for coping with the Holocaust."
Throughout, Kluger writes of the uneasy relationship with her paranoiac mother. Their hellish journey to Theresienstadt and Auschwitz forces an uneasy bonding. But if she is critical, she also shows moments of great tenderness. In the horror of the airless, crowded cattle train, Kluger's mother allows a woman to sit on her knee. When the woman urinates on her in terror, she is pushed away without malice.
Ruth's father disappeared into the Holocaust. Unfinished business between father and daughter weighs heavily. However, this loss is far larger than domestic drama. In memory, she sees her father raising his hat politely to neighbours in the Burgstrasse and then imagines him murdered by the very men he greeted. Kluger laments the loss of her father, but also screams in outrage at all those other fathers who killed Jews.
This book is a fascinating study of the way one child's life was ripped into shreds by the Shoah. It is as important as The Diary of Anne Frank – and equally unforgettable.
The reviewer's new play, 'Crossing Jerusalem', opens at the Tricycle Theatre, London, on 13 March
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