Those Who Save Us [Paperback]

Jenna Blum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Blum, who worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, takes a direct, unsentimental look at the Holocaust in her first novel. The narrative alternates between the present-day story of Trudy, a history professor at a Minneapolis university collecting oral histories of WWII survivors (both German and Jewish), and that of her aged but once beautiful German mother, Anna, who left her country when she married an American soldier. Interspersed with Trudy's interviews with German immigrants, many of whom reveal unabashed anti-Semitism, Anna's story flashes back to her hometown of Weimar. As Nazi anti-Jewish edicts intensify in the 1930s, Anna hides her love affair with a Jewish doctor, Max Stern. When Max is interned at nearby Buchenwald and Anna's father dies, Anna, carrying Max's child, goes to live with a baker who smuggles bread to prisoners at the camp. Anna assists with the smuggling after Trudy's birth until the baker is caught and executed. Then Anna catches the eye of the Obersturmführer, a high-ranking Nazi officer at Buchenwald, who suspects her of also supplying the inmates with bread. He coerces her into a torrid, abusive affair, in which she remains complicit to ensure her survival and that of her baby daughter. Blum paints a subtle, nuanced portrait of the Obersturmführer, complicating his sordid cruelty with more delicate facets of his personality. Ultimately, present and past overlap with a shocking yet believable coincidence. Blum's spare imagery is nightmarish and intimate, imbuing familiar panoramas of Nazi atrocity with stark new power. This is a poised, hair-raising debut.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Family secrets of Nazi Germany are at the core of this powerful first novel told in two narratives that alternate between New Heidelberg, Minnesota, in the present, and the small town of Weimar near Buchenwald during World War II. Trudy is a professor of German history in Minnesota, where she's teaching a seminar on women's roles in Nazi Germany and conducting interviews with Germans about how they're dealing with what they did during the war. But her mother, Anna, won't talk about it, not even to her own daughter. Trudy knows, she remembers, that Anna was mistress to a big Nazi camp officer. Why did she do it? Was he Trudy's father? The interviews are a plot contrivance to introduce a range of attitudes, from blatant racism to crippling survivor guilt. But the characters, then and now, are drawn with rare complexity, including a brave, gloomy, unlucky rescuer and a wheeler-dealer survivor. Anna's story is a gripping mystery in a page-turner that raises universal questions of shame, guilt, and personal responsibility. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 482 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Reprint edition (May 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156031663
• ISBN-13: 978-0156031660
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (417 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #37 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Jewish American
  • #76 in Books > History > Europe > Germany

More About the Author

JENNA BLUM is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of THOSE WHO SAVE US and THE STORMCHASERS; she is also one of Oprah's Top Thirty Women Writers. Jenna's debut novel THOSE WHO SAVE US is a New York Times bestseller; a Boston Globe bestseller; the winner of the 2005 Ribalow Prize, adjudged by Elie Wiesel; a BORDERS book club pick, a perennial book club favorite, and the # 1 bestselling novel in Holland in 2011--still on the Dutch bestseller list in 2012. Jenna's second novel, THE STORMCHASERS, is a Boston Globe bestseller, a Target Emerging Authors pick, and a bestseller in Holland and France.

Jenna has been writing since she was four and professionally since she was sixteen, when her short story "The Legacy of Frank Finklestein" won Seventeen Magazine's National Fiction Contest. Jenna is a graduate of Kenyon College (B.A., English) and Boston University (M.A., Creative Writing) and has taught creative and communications writing for 15 years, for Boston University and most recently for Grub Street Writers. Jenna was AGNI literary magazine's fiction editor for 5 years and now contributes the Friday Five-0 and Writer On The Road advice columns for Grub Street Daily. Jenna currently lives in Wichita, KS, with award-winning photographer Jim Reed and their black Lab, Woodrow. Jenna is researching her third novel and has just finished writing the screenplay for THOSE WHO SAVE US. She loves to visit book clubs in person, by phone, and via Skype. Please contact her on Facebook (Jenna Blum), on Twitter (@jenna_blum) and on her website, www.jennablum.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

327 of 336 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A new take on the Holocaust April 19, 2005

By Jane Roper

Format:Paperback

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.

182 of 191 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brave, compassionate and usettling debut novel treats dangers of sequestered personal anguish April 24, 2007

By Bruce J. Wasser

Format:Paperback

"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. Read more ›

132 of 143 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A fast-paced and entertaining page-turner January 2, 2005

By David M. Scott

Format:Hardcover

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!

103 of 114 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Unable to put this book down June 14, 2009

By Scott D. Stephens VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

I honestly could not put this book down. After each chapter, I took a moment to consider the story and the themes behind it. Many times, I had tears in my eyes; at other times I laughed aloud. I was sad to come to the end of the book and I've been thinking about the story ever since. I'm still undecided about how much I actually liked it. The story is compelling - it almost captures the complicated themes and emotions involved in this topic. The twists and turns in the plot make for a real page turner. The characters, however, are a bit lacking, and not quite fully developed.

Any book that screams when you put it down and stays in your thoughts well after reading it, is a solid work and worth reading.

31 of 32 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Literature That Saves Us April 28, 2004

By Pauline Briere

Format:Hardcover

Review of THOSE WHO SAVE US, by Jenna Blum

It's been quite some time since I've read a novel that I had difficulty putting down, and I read a lot of contemporary fiction. Perhaps the toughest criticism Jenna Blum will face is that her readers will complain they couldn't get anything else done until the book was finished. Of course, the story is compelling all on its own--the German/German-American take on Nazi brutality and the whole experience of guilt and shame as survivors in their own right--BUT, there are many compelling stories and not all of them make a reader hunger for the next intelligent, unusual turn of phrase. The experience of reading such rich, vivid language--words that have the power to create a certain tangibility in place and character--is what distinguishes her novel from others I might also say are "page-turners." The prose is lush, here, palpable in a way that brought me inside each and every scene.

Given her topic, readers will do a significant amount of hand-wringing until the last page is turned (crying, gasping, cringing at the brutality). There's Horst's sexual shenanigans and then the violence aimed at children (Rainer's brother's murder and Trudy's German subject with the eye patch). Within my Jewish community I know many, many Holocaust survivors, their children and also their grandchildren; while all support the idea of keeping this kind of history alive through well-researched fiction and non-fiction, some shy away from actually reading about such things (too painful, especially for those who survived the conflagration themselves or who, like my husband, listened to parents crying out in their sleep with nightmares).... I would say that all should--all MUST--read it because along with the pain and suffereing Blum portrays, she offers her readers the possibility of tremendous redemption from the intergenerational guilt that surviorship engenders.

An important message about guilt and redemption is at the heart of THOSE WHO SAVE US. While I don't think a parallel can ever be made between what the Jewish people and Germans such as Anna and Pfeffer suffered from the Nazis in WWII, Blum reminds us that suffering was pervasive, that there was a hefty pricetag attached to survival for all because it often involved some form of character degradation (whether one became an SS whore like Anna or a Frau Kluge type extorting valuables from the Jews and then turning her victims in anyway); from this a lifetime of torment followed. Blum captures the ugly reality of human desperation, what is oddly within the realm of the norm when the topic is war. That she has portrayed this from the German perspective elevates it to a universal quality of suffering that offers the possibility of universal expiation. Even someone as sinister as her Obersturmfuhrer in the novel can be tossed into the pot of war troubles and deprivations fomenting during this period in history that made it roil with atrocities.

Of all Blum's characters, I was most drawn to Anna and her steadfast adherence to keeping her past a secret. I loved when her daughter Trudy finally understood that her mother had a right to her silence, that it was an individual "choice." While I sympathized with Trudy's quest for the truth, it was really Anna's view that grabbed me by the softest underbelly of my recent experience with losing my mother and said: Hey! I have a right to secrecy, you know! It's MY life not yours! (Do we children ever cease to be greedy beasts, however old or grown up we become?) I wish to thank Blum for Anna's reminder to let such things as a mother's private matters (her pain?) pass into the dust with her if that was her wish.

History, itself, should never pass into the dust, however. This novel could easily be one of those rare historical works which will be vital reading for the generations coming up. For it is the descendents of WWII's survivor population (I include Jews AND Gentiles here) as well as everyone everywhere who will need a glaring reminder in the future of this war's particular brand of brutality. Kudos to Blum for not sanitizing the heinousness of war, and for so thoughtfully and graphically rendering fact into the most engaging fictional form.

Pauline Briere Read more ›