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AudibleInk - Those Who Save Us
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List Price: $24.00
Our Price: $33.86
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Harcourt
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Currently OUT OF STOCK
Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Harcourt
Manufacturer: Harcourt
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: 2004-04-05
Publisher: Harcourt
Studio: Harcourt
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Editorial Reviews:
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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 Obersturmführer 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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking
Comment: This book is unusual for a Holocaust book, because none of the protagonists are wholly good or entirely bad. The villain is capable of love, and the female lead character is unable to love. Good men are damaged goods, and even the innocent next generation is disabled. It definitely is worth reading.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: What would you do?
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Haunting and evocative
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Page-turner
Comment: 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.
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