Those Who Save Us
Ratings10
Average rating4.3
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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The only thing that keeps me from giving this book a full five stars is the rushed nature of the ending; I felt almost as though Blum was racing for a looming deadline. The pacing definitely changed in the last few chapters.
Overall, the book is compelling and hard to put down. I definitely enjoyed it, and it offers a different perspective on the events in Nazi Germany than most historical fiction thus far has offered.
