by Jenna Blum
|
| List Price: | $14.00 |
| Amazon Price: | $11.20 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
| You Save: | $2.80 (20%) |
| Average Rating: |  |
| Lowest New Price: | $6.85 |
| Availablitiy: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
|
 |
|
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.
Customers who bought this item also bought
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 easy read despite heavy subject, 2008-09-30
This story takes the reader back and forth between Anna, a young German girl surviving WWII, and Trudy, her grown daughter who mistakenly believes her father is an SS officer. The story offers a good dose of tragedy, as one might expect, but it remains hopeful without becoming too soft. Well worth reading and I will gladly recommend it!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
great read, 2008-09-15
If you like Holacaust drama, this is accurate and real enough to draw you in and be taken along on this incredible story
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Those Who Save Us, 2008-09-11
Those Who Save Us
I have read a lot of books about WWII from a Jewish perspective, but never from a German (non-Jewish perspective). There were several things about this book that I really enjoyed. I felt that Blum did a great job developing the characters during both periods; however, I felt like she lacked the ability to connect the characters. This book fals into the "historical fiction" category, so realize that not a lot of detail is accurate.
Overall, I think this was a great read and a good book.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 A moral quandary in time of war, 2008-09-09
"Those Who Save Us" by Jenna Blum is another of the terrific debut novels I've recently chanced upon. Since I can't do any better than the synopsis on the back cover, I've copied it here as follows:
"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. Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the heartbreaking truth of her mother's life."
There are two major and intertwined plots within this novel: Anna's source of shame and silence, that being the pivotal choice she made during the war to keep herself and Trudy alive, and Anna's prickly relationship with Trudy throughout the years. As such, the novel is structured with the past (mostly in Weimar, Germany) and the present (in Minnesota) alternating, though never losing the integrity of its narrative thread and the impact of its previous chapters.
Anna's and Trudy's lives, whether during the war or present, made for a captivating read. Much of that satisfaction is derived from the assured and precise writing that makes the characters very real and their experiences convincing. The urgency of the war, its attendant life-or-death choices, the horrors of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and the sadness and terror that permeated Anna's life kept me turning the pages, eager to discover what happens next. Trudy's desolation, the result of a fragmented and traumatic early childhood, and the inability to penetrate her mother's wall of silence, is heartrending. Blum puts it so well: "Loneliness isn't corrosive. It is eviscerating." This is a powerful story of two unforgettable women--one strong and courageous who paid a tremendous price for survival, the other conflicted and bewildered, yet determined to find the answers through her interviews of German war survivors. Given its themes it, surprisingly, never lapses into oversentimentality.
The characters are sharply drawn: the pragmatic and brave Frau Mathilde Staudt who risked her life in the Resistance and became Anna's and Trudy's savior; the sadistic Obersturmführer who contaminated Anna's life forever; Anna's first love, Max Stern; Anna's domineering father, Gerhard, sycophantic toward the Reich; and not to forget the courtly Mr. Pfeffer whose war memories are key to the healing of Anna and Trudy. All of them had emotional depth.
I only have one negative thing to say and it is the explicit sex that is described in far too much detail for my liking. I don't think the novel's impact would have been lessened if this had been toned down. Nevertheless, it is a five-star read for I found the story spellbinding and the writing to be profound. No doubt, an impressive debut.
0 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 Promising Start...only to be let down., 2008-08-28
I found the first half of this book to be very interesting and certainly the "page turner" that many others have described. The parts written from Anna's point of view were great and engaging... but I couldn't have cared less about Trudy. There was nothing about that character that made me like her in the least. I thought her a spoiled, arrogant, bratty person. What I really wanted to do was skip all of her parts of the book and read only the parts about Anna.
**spoiler alert**
The big revelation at the end of the book was highly anti-climatic. It was just like all of a sudden the book was finished. I expected a lot more in the reveal, a bigger confrontation or conversation between Anna and Trudy - for Anna to tell her daughter with her own words what happened and how she felt about it all these years later. I felt very let down by the end of this book.
**spoiler end**
I also found the style of prose to be very annoying. Quotation marks are not used to set off characters speaking and it becomes kind of difficult to read in a visual way. Not exactly sure why this was done, but I found it distracting.
A decent read, but don't rush out to buy it.
Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.
|
Store Categories
|