"There were lots of tears in the interviews," says author Sarah Helm of her meetings with last survivors of the Nazis' only concentration camp for women, Ravensbrück. Ms. Klüger, you will be speaking in the German parliament, the Bundestag, on Wednesday in Berlin - the city from which the Nazis planned and ordered horrendous crimes against humanity. But that's not the case for Holocaust survivors. Today, she is impressed that Germany is welcoming refugees. Those who were left were those in the sick barracks who had reason to believe they wouldn't survive. Kluger and her mother were imprisoned at Theresienstadt concentration camp when she was 11 and later transferred to Auschwitz and then Gross-Rosen. Could you understand at the time what was happening? Klüger and her mother ultimately survived by escaping from a death march. And you didn't have your own bathtub or toilet. Klüger, a professor emerita of German at UC Irvine, died October 5 at the age of 88. When the camp was invaded, everyone was forced to relocate. But it's not a bad choice because Auschwitz was a particularly destructive camp. (25.01.2016), Artists held in Nazi concentration camps documented the horror of torture and death in drawings and paintings. Klüger agreed, ending her speech in Berlin in support of Merkel’s policy, the final four words the borrowed language of the country’s head of state. I take sleeping pills now even though I have a comfortable mattress. That feeling has changed over the past 10 to 15 years. As a child, you spent time in three concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Christianstadt, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen. In September 1942 Ruth and her mother were forced to leave Vienna on one of the last transports to Theresienstadt, a ghetto in northwestern Czechoslovakia. I can say a few religious words about remembrance and find closure with a sense of contentedness. How can you even sleep? Speech by Ruth Klüger on 27 January 2016 in remembrance of the victims of National Socialism . Her mother had lived long enough to develop a last love, with her great-granddaughter. Ruth Klüger survived three Nazi concentration camps. In 1942, at the age of eleven, she was deported to the Nazi "family camp" Theresienstadt with her mother. There were also illegal transports to Palestine. But it seems to be a majority, or at least a strong and willful part of society, that is in favor of opening the gates and accepting others. "Never again" is often an important part of commemoration. The dead are ashes scattered somewhere. © 2020 Deutsche Welle | Ruth Klüger is a writer and university professor. Klüger, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1931, was just six-years-old when German troops arrived in the country. Her father was a young doctor with a promising future, her mother "the daughter of a wealthy chemical engineer." SPIEGEL: How long did you and your mother stay in Vienna? An ex-intelligence agent, le Carre knew his subject firsthand. It was there a young woman whispered to her that she should lie to the officer. Many had already been gassed and others were on death marches. (Klüger, 2001) They reunited at a concentration camp named Christianstadt in Poland. Only her mother stands out, a shrewd paranoid who persisted into her 90s, outlasting two more husbands. Download it here. If you've been to a real burial, you'll notice the difference. This week: "InstaLab for iOS & Android". DW Digital tests the most popular apps. This, Smith said, is when Klüger’s love of German poetry gestated. By age eleven, she had been deported, along with her mother, to Theresienstadt, the first in a series of concentration camps which would become the setting for her precarious childhood. She arrived at UC Irvine in 1976, briefly leaving for Princeton from 1980-86, before her return to campus and her retirement in 1994. It's important that this tremendous change has taken place. “I owe her my life,” Klüger told parliament. Check against delivery. 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. After the war Klüger studied in Regensburg and then in 1947 emigrated with her mother to the United States, where she graduated from Hunter College and went on to earn a Ph.D. in German from Berkeley. Surviving was not normal. The conductor talks with DW about life in amidst of the coronavirus. Her memory and life’s story are preserved in the speech, and her internationally bestselling memoir, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Both emigrated to the United States in 1947, where Klüger attended Hunter College in New York City before earning her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Together with her mother, she survived three concentration camps: Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Christianstadt. 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