Das Weiterleben der Ruth Klüger

The film portrays the American literary scholar, who was born in Vienna, against the backdrop of the question of how her life unfolded after her survival.

It is one thing to have survived the Holocaust. But it is quite another to ask how this life unfolded after survival and what traces the experiences of persecution and death threats left in the life of a survivor.
THE SURVIVAL OF RUTH KLÜGER portrays the American literary scholar Ruth Klüger, who was born in Vienna, against the backdrop of this question. It does so in the four places that have shaped her life: Vienna, California, Göttingen and Israel. Ruth Klüger allows the cinema audience to share in her reflections, even in very intimate situations: about her childhood in ‘anti-Jewish’ Vienna, her parents, her own role as the mother of two American sons, about being a woman and how memorial sites deal with remembrance. At no point in the film is she melodramatic or vain. Her thinking is precise and repeatedly unsparing towards herself and others.
Ruth Klüger was born in Vienna, the daughter of a Jewish gynaecologist. Even in her early childhood, she experienced anti-Semitism and the systematic exclusion of Jews from public life in her hometown. She first learned that Nazi persecution did not spare her own family when her father fled to France. Nevertheless, he and her half-brother fell victim to the Nazi extermination of the Jews. In 1942, at the age of eleven, Ruth Klüger was deported with her mother to a concentration camp, first to Theresienstadt. She was then imprisoned in Auschwitz and Christianstadt, a satellite camp of the Groß-Rosen concentration camp. In 1945, she managed to escape shortly before the end of the war. Ruth Klüger emigrated to the USA in 1947 and studied library science and German language and literature at New York University.