Landscapes of Memory

Book excerpt: Ruth Kluger is one of the child-survivors of the Holocaust. In 1942, at the age of eleven, she was deported to the Nazi 'family camp' Theresienstadt with her mother. They would move to two other camps (including Auschwitz-Birkenau) before the war ended. LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY is the story of Ruth's life. Of a childhood spent in the Nazi camps and her refusal to forget the past as an adult in America. 'It is not in our power to forgive: memory does that for us,' says Kluger. Not erasing a single detail, not even the inconvenient ones, she writes frankly about the troubled relationship with her mother even through their years of internment, and of her determination not to forgive and absolve the past. It is this memory, pure and harsh, this anger, savage and profound, that makes Kluger's memoir so unforgettable. A gripping narrative and a superb meditation on the relationship between private memory and history, on forgiveness and redemption, LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY will become a classic of our times.