Those Who Save Us | Jenna Blum

Those Who Save Us | Jenna Blum | Great book, couldn't put it down

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Those Who Save Us

	Those Who Save Us Jenna Blum Adult, 2005 - 496 pages average customer review:based on 99 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Holocuast Fiction

This page turner tells the story of a beautiful German young woman caught between her love of an older Jewish doctor, her futile attemps to hide him, the birth of their daughter and the indignities and pain she must suffer at the hands of an SS officer to ensure the girl's survival. Then the tale jumps to the pleasureless life of her daughter whose only clue to her mother's past leads her to believe that the SS officer was her father, and that her mother colluded with the nazis for personal comfort. It is her search into her mother's past which leads her on a mission of self discovery and history. I could not put this book down. My only complaint is that at no time does the author satisfactorily explain why the mother kept her heroism a secret even from her American husband and her daughter. The explanation that the past is in the past... doesn't fill in the blanks. Nor does the notion of survivor's guilt. The woman suffered from the derision of the townfolk in her American home because she was German. Had she merely explained her history she would not have been so alone in life. However, I usually love any fairly well written holocaust literature, and I loved this book as well.

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Great book, couldn't put it down

A truly great read and an amazing story. This is one of those books that I have to pass on anybody who likes to read and I know they will love it.

Read this book

I finished the novel yesterday afternoon, and woke up thinking, wondering about the characters. That is a sign of a good book-characters that stick with you. Those Who Save Us is one of those novels that has so many layers that it is hard to decide where to start talking about it. Ultimately, it is a novel about survival and what one will do to survive. Reading about Anna and the choices she made during the war provided me with a fresh and interesting point of view, and one that I hadn't thought much about before-what did the German women do in the midst of the terror that was plaguing their country? Well-written and thought provoking, Those Who Save Us is a must read.

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A stunning evocation of the Holocaust

I just finished this wonderful book, and can't add much to what other favorable reviews have said. I loved it. I was touched by the characters. The mother-daughter relationship is beautifully and realistically rendered. The horrors of life in Nazi Germany were so painful that I had to stop reading at times. The ending offered some hope for healing while at the same time recognizing the near imposibility of changing what the past has wrought. Definitely in my top 20 of all time.

a good read

I enjoyed this novel quite a bit. It's the story of a German mother's survival with her young daughter in Nazi Germany. That's a good story, even if a little bit manipulative. The novel moves back and forth in time, from Germany in the 1940's to modern times in America, where the mother and child are 50 years older, and struggling to understand or shut out the past. In is the story of these women in the present which is the best told and most fascinating. Of course, the reader needs the stories from both eras to make sense of things. While not a great work of fiction, Those Who Save Us is quite good.

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