By: Jenna Blum Publisher: Harvest Books Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Harvest Books Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 496 Publication Date: May 02, 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.
Promising Start...only to be let down. 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.
Amazing book, seemed like a true and heartbreaking account Thank you to the author for sharing this amazing story. I truly felt the confusion and desperation of the characters (even, in part, the 'bad guys') and how our life choices can haunt us when we view them through our own shadowed lenses.
Great Book! The book was wonderfully written and I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are so many Holocaust books written but his one had a great viewpoint.
Not well written Interesting story we have heard before. Annoyingly written, and really needs editing. Inaccuracies regarding certain facts related to Holocaust.
Those Who Save Us I thought the experiences of the characters were probably based on some fact. The story depicted to me the right to survive and persist during the most trying time in world history. Judgement of the main character could be harsh if one has never experienced a life threatening situation for themselves or their love ones. The guilt of surviving and how it was accomplished haunts the woman who had to do what she did to protect her loved one. The author kept my interest througout the book and at times I felt deeply for the woman and how she submitted herself to survive.
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