Those Who Save Us

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Author(s):

Jenna Blum

Label: Adult
Publisher(s):

Adult

Studio: Adult
Manufacturer: Adult
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $10.50
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald.

Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life.

Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.

Customer Reviews

Wonderful book

I loved this book, although the subject matter made it very difficult to read at times. It's a survival story that will leave you wondering what you would have done in the same situation in order to protect your child and make it out alive. Well written, beautiful and heartbreaking.

What would you do?

Guilt, fear and prejudice come in many forms. In both this book and the also great "Sarah's Key", WWII survivors' guilt of things they did and didn't do not only haunt them for their entire lives, but the lingering guilt severely affects the way they raise their children. This is an interesting (fictional but believable) insight into a German woman's struggle for her and her daughter to survive the war and how the terror never ends for her. It also helps address the question: "Why did the Germans let the Holocaust happen?". There are no excuses, just a description of the culture at that horrible time.

I highly recommend this book for those, like me, who love stories that deal with complicated issues of relationships.

Haunting and evocative

Jenna Blum's "Those Who Save Us" chronicles the Holocaust-era journey of Anna Schlemmer, beginning in 1939, as she navigates the treacherous waters of everyday life in the Third Reich and makes difficult choices in order to survive, choices that will haunt her fifty years later even after she escapes Germany as a war bride in 1945 and settles in Minnesota.

Anna's daughter Gertrude, Trudy for short, is a tenured professor of history specializing in German women's roles during WWII. Aloof and obsessively clean, Trudy begins a German Project to try and interview immigrant Germans who lived through WWII, to capture the experience of ordinary German civilians even as her colleague Ruth records the memories of Holocaust survivors with the same grant money. Trudy must also care for her aging mother after her father's death; Anna is silent about the war, and Trudy's only clues come from twisted dreams and shards of memories of her early years in Germany, and a single forbidden photograph of a young Trudy, Anna, and an unknown SS officer. She searches desperately for the key to unlock Anna's silence about the SS officer that Trudy remembers as Saint Nicholas.

The story alternates between Anna's wartime experiences from 1939 to 1945 and Trudy, circa 1997, as she struggles to uncover the truth behind her mother's unending silence, to unearth Anna's sacrifices to ensure her survival even as German civilians were starving to death towards the end of the war. Trudy has inherited her mother's sense of distance, her cold detachment, and is utterly alone, unable to freely love. The narrative device works well, and the two women bear threads of similarity in their personalities although their narrative voices are distinct.

Poignantly told, "Those Who Save Us" gently examines seemingly small choices that haunt us decades after their perpetration, probes the depths of human depravity, and untangles the threads that connect us to our past. The novel is filled with evocative smells; Anna worked in a bakery, and the pages are dusted with flour and the cloying sweetness of marzipan and chocolate as Anna bakes furiously to exorcise the ghosts of her past. Blum does an admirable job of simply painting the stage; she allows the story to speak for itself. We are shown both sides of the Holocaust, from snippets of the Resistance and prisoner networks to the coldhearted SS elite that perpetrate unspeakable crimes and those ordinary German citizens who aided them if only to delay their own deaths. Anna's own harsh judgment of her wartime choices is far more punishing than the shunning the superstitious citizens of her new adopted town can mete out. Evocative and haunting, I couldn't put "Those Who Save Us" down until the final climactic truths had spilled out and the final pieces had slid into place.

Page-turner

This was an instant page turner. I like how the author went back and forth between the past and the present and the way she described all of the main characters. I thought the ending could have been better but at the same time it made sense.

Heartwarming Holocaust book about mothers and daughters

This story starts with a young girl whose mother passed away and her irritable and erratic father makes strict and demanding look sweet. It is also told about 40 years later from the daughter's point of view as she is researching German, non-Jewish people to get their thoughts on what happened in Germany during that time, what they saw but didn't tell, etc.

This is an amazing book. It was written for adults, there is a great deal of sex, as was standard during this time that the German soldiers would use their power to manipulate women into doing what they wanted for protection, and often more importantly, food. I love Anna's whole story, seeing all the events leading up to the discovery of why she is how she is and Trudie's realization that life isn't always how one believes it to be.

I highly recommend this book to those who aren't offended by sex and some language. I felt it to be very real, an emotional roller coaster of a book, but in the end, heartwarming and redeeming.

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