Those Who Save Us: A Bestselling Saga of Mothers and Daughters, Inherited Guilt, and Survival in WWII Germany
New York Times Bestseller • Winner of the Ribalow Prize, awarded by Hadassah Magazine
An estranged mother and daughter reunite to confront their family’s role in World War II in this harrowing, unforgettable novel about lost love and inherited shame from New York Times bestselling author Jenna Blum.
For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer 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, Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive.
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Community Reviews
"She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame."
I have long been interested in WWII, and especially the European front. Nazis fascinate me because I don't understand how people can be so evil and so hateful to another human being. I don't get the driving force to shame, hurt and then murder someone. It makes no sense how someone can be completely devoid of conscience that even a hundredth of what happened to the prisoners of the Nazis could actually happen. In the past, I've mostly stuck to reading about the survivors of concentration camps and those who helped save their Jewish neighbors by hiding them, but Those Who Save Us takes a look at the German perspective.
It follows Anna, a pretty German girl who hides a Jewish doctor and gets pregnant by him, just before he is arrested and she never sees him again. (This book does not have a happy ending in the way I define happy endings. And I don't define happy endings as the kind one might receive at the end of a massage, I'm just saying... this isn't a romance novel. Moving on...) She joins the Nazi resistance, becomes the mistress of a high-ranking Nazi official and then marries an American soldier after her little town of Weimar is liberated.
And then she never talks about it again.
Fast forward fifty years, and we get the story of her daughter, Trudy, whose only clue to what happened during the first three years of her life is locked up in a jeweled case displaying a photo of her, her mother and the Nazi officer. Though her mother has long taught her to live as "the past is dead, and better it remain so," Trudy is a German history professor at the University of Minnesota, specializing in German women during WWII. As she begins investigating, she unravels secrets that she otherwise wouldn't have.
As most books involving the Nazis, this book is heart wrenching, disturbing and upsetting. As well as being fascinating as it studies the human condition when one is forced to survive. It's frustrating, because the whole time I wait for Anna to tell the story to her daughter. I wait for evidence that she and Jack, the Ami who saved her, lived a happy life. But, when you branch outside of the romance genre, you don't always get what you want.
In terms of writing, some of it is beautiful, and other passages fail to get the point across and end up just being a bunch of big words strung together. This shouldn't stop anyone from wanting to read it, though.
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A revolting, shocking truth from the side that never got to tell their story.
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