THOSE WHO SAVE US
By Jenna Blum
Harcourt, 2004
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of meeting Jenna Blum at my local library. What a lovely woman! She stood in the front of a packed room and told us what drove her to write THOSE WHO SAVE US, her haunting and incredibly poignant first novel. (The driving forces: her German/Jewish background, trips she took to Germany with her mother, and her work for Steven Speilberg’s Shoah Foundation.) And with that briefest of speeches, Ms. Blum asked us–her audience–why we were there. “What you have to say is much more interesting to me than anything I have to say,” she told us … and then gave us the floor. There were questions about her characters, their actions, her experiences in Germany, her thoughts on Germans living in America today, her educational background, and her writing process. Ms. Blum answered all these (and more) with an enthusiasm and honesty that endeared her—as if her novel had not already—to everyone in the room. This is a woman who is not only very good at what she does, but seems to take great joy from doing it.
THOSE WHO SAVE US is the story of Anna, an Aryan German woman caught in a bad place at a very bad time … Nazi Germany at the beginning of World War II. To protect her daughter, the illegitimate child of a Jewish doctor, Anna does what she must. It is also the story of Trudy, Anna’s daughter, who grows to adulthood believing herself the daughter of a Nazi officer. Mother and child must come to terms with their past, their present, and, most importantly, with each other. There are scenes in this book I will never forget, which is, I think, why books like THOSE WHO SAVE US are so important. Not a one of us should ever forget.
I highly recommend this book.