Ruth Klueger gets Austrian literary prize

KREMS, Austria (AFP) US writer and academic Ruth Klueger, a Holocaust survivor, late Friday received Austrias important Theodor Kramer literary prize, which honours resistance and exile writers. The award, which carries prize money of 7,300 euros ($10,360), was handed over in Krems near Vienna. Born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1931, Klueger was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 and then to Auschwitz in 1944 and Gross-Rosen. Following the liberation of the Nazi camps at the end of World War II, she first settled in Bavaria in southern Germany, but emigrated to the United States in 1947 where she studied and subsequently taught German literature at a number of universities. She wrote about her childhood in the book weiter leben in 1989 which was published in English under the title Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood. Klueger has received numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Memoire de la Shoah in 1998 following the publication of Still Alive in French under the title Refus de temoigner.

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