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Those Who Save Us | 
 enlarge | Author: Jenna Blum
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
Buy Used: $4.97
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Rating:  85 reviews
Sales Rank: 1289
Media: Paperback
Pages: 496
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1
ISBN: 0156031663
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.6
EAN: 9780156031660
ASIN: 0156031663
Publication Date: May 2, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Binding tight. Pages have no writing, no hi-lighting and no underlining. Cover in good shape. Spine has normal creases from reading.
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 80 more reviews...
 A fast-paced and entertaining page-turner January 2, 2005
David M. Scott (Boston, MA)
47 out of 53 found this review helpful
I'm always on the lookout for historical literary thrillers, but there are so few good ones out there. Those Who Save Us, while certainly not marketed as one, really is a historical literary thriller in every way. And it's a terrific one indeed. Jenna Blum's writing style reminds me of David Liss more than any other writer.
Those Who Save Us is a real page-turner. At the end of each chapter, Jenna Blum left me hanging and wanting (no needing) to know what's next. Yes, I cared about the characters very much -- but like a great thriller, I was also drawn into the plot in a way that I couldn't let go.
OK, so the book is about choice and the backdrop of the horrors of the holocaust are terrible indeed, but I was expecting all that. What I wasn't expecting was that the narrative would be so fast-paced. It is quite an accomplishment for an author to deal with moral issues in history and entertain the reader at the same time.
So here's my two cents for Jenna Blum's literary agent: If you haven't already, I think you should consider marketing the mass-market paperback rights in the literary thriller category. This book should have a completely different cover, different marketing, different blurbs and different cover copy to appeal to people who buy books in airports and through Amazon's "thrillers" category. This is an entertaining book! Don't hide that fact!
Brave, compassionate and usettling debut novel treats dangers of sequestered personal anguish April 24, 2007
Bruce J. Wasser (Lake Bluff, IL)
41 out of 42 found this review helpful
"Those Who Save Us," Jenna Blum's courageous and chastening debut novel, investigates two themes that are at once profoundly historical and deeply personal. With elegant, fast-paced prose, Blum narrates a story that reveals the enduring impact of the Holocaust while bravely exploring the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The two damaged women who are the focus of the novel, a mother permanently ruined by the course of actions she pursued during the Holocaust and her daughter, ravaged by a sense of incomplete identity and derivative pain, travel eerily parallel paths. Both struggle with identity, grapple with ethics and lead isolated, unfulfilled lives. One willingly needs to obliterate the past; the other desperately requires the past in order to form a coherent sense of her present self. This triumphant novel enables the reader to see the world through both protagonists' eyes, to suffer their pain and to ask existential questions the answers to which may only result in more suffering.
The daughter of an officious, sycophantic lower-level Nazi lawyer, Anna Schlemmer violates the Reich's prohibitions against carnal relationships with Jews. The resulting pregnancy and her father's subsequent repudiation, occurring at the onset of World War II, force Anna to find a means of survival. Anna's decisions, and the long-term reverberations those choices engendered, compose one of the two interwoven strands of the novel. From her decision to involve herself in the resistance to her wrenching degradation at the hands of an SS officer, Anna's focus narrows. Despite a near complete loss of self-respect, she keeps her cherished daughter alive. This loss of conscience -- this descent into self-eradication -- teaches us a great deal about what occurs to good people when placed in an environment of unprecedented fear and brutality.
Anna's daughter, Trudy, lives a half century removed from her mother's ordeal, but knows literally nothing about her past. A "conspiracy of silence, a wall that Trudy could neither penetrate or scale" forbids her from her mother's past. Only a photograph of Anna, Trudy and a German military officer exists, and Trudy can only construct a flimsy artifice of her own story. She knows that Anna's American husband is not her "real" father, but knowledge of who is not cannot supplant the agony of not knowing who is. Divorced, alienated and terribly lonely, Trudy knows only her mother's repeated injunction: "The past is dead...and better it remain so." Ironically, as a professor of German history, Trudy strives to teach indifferent students about the very past that is utterly unknown to her on the deepest personal level.
Blum is at her best in depicting the awful hurt those who suffer transmitted trauma experience. For every indignity Anna suffered in the 1940s, her daughter relives in the 1990s. Deprived of stories, the fundamental building blocks of attachment between a parents and children, Trudy cannot know herself. Her mother's stony silence and absolute unwillingness to reveal the past -- and herself -- to her daughter are doubly isolating, removing the mother from the daughter and the daughter from her self.
The maelstrom of the Holocaust tears apart the world Anna knew and skews her ability to mother her young daughter, Trudy plods through live in a loveless, sterile environment, each day a drab duplicate of insufficient hopes and dwindling expectations. In Jenna Blum's capable hands, these two women emerge as archetypes of conflicted hopes, mangled dreams and beleaguered interpreters of the past. If stories serve as the trellis around which we twine ourselves in order to grow, "Those Who Save Us" underscores the dangers of struggling through life without the requisite support of knowledge of the past. This brave, compassionate and deeply unsettling novel emboldens us to remember and recount.
A new take on the Holocaust April 19, 2005
J. E. Roper (Boston, MA)
34 out of 35 found this review helpful
As other reviewers have said, this book is a real page turner. I absolutely tore through it, drawn in by the powerful storytelling and gripping plot.
What I liked most about this novel, however, was the new perspective it granted on Germany and Germans during the war. This is the side of the Holocaust that has been largely unexplored in literature until now -- how ordinary German citizens confronted or ignored the crimes against Jews, while at the same time trying to ensure their own survival. There are no easy answers, of course, and the book does a good job of acknowledging that fact, while still hammering home the horrors of what happened.
Most importantly, it kept me thinking and questioning: if I were a non-Jewish German, what would I have done? A book that inspires that sort of reflection and thought -- while also providing a riveting, satisfying read -- is a rare treat indeed.
WOW! One of the Best Books I've Ever Read March 28, 2007
Gina Bolvin
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
If you havent bought this book yet, buy it NOW. It is one of those books that keeps you up at night because you cant put it down- and one of those books that you dont want to end. It's words will stay with you long after you read them. Jenna Blum's characters walk off the page. This book should hae been on the NY Times as one of the 10 Most Notable Books of the Year.
# 1 BOOK CLUB PICK August 2, 2006
Andi B (New Hampshire USA)
13 out of 14 found this review helpful
If you read one book this summer, make it this one! When my book club chose THOSE WHO SAVE US, I wasn't totally on board. As an avid reader of historical fiction, I felt I'd reached a saturation point with Holocaust stories. But wow, what a difference one book makes. This author narrates the events of World War II from the perspective of a German woman, and I can't stop thinking about that character--Anna--and what she endured to save herself and her child, what I would have done in her shoes. I cried at the ending, which I never ever do. I dreamed about these characters! I'll be the first in line to buy Jenna Blum's next book.
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