Those Who Save Us (Blum)

Book Reviews 
Jenna Blum's accomplished first novel, Those Who Save Us, is both vast and intimate in its reach.... Utterly believable.... An absorbing tale of two women's struggles with the burdens and responsibilities of remembrance.
Boston Globe

The book's power... [lies] in examining the emotional and moral gray area between heroism and collaboration....Those Who Save Us bursts with provocative questions about the ambiguous possibilities of culpability.
San Francisco Chronicle

It seems strange to think of someone writing a pleasant novel about the Holocaust, but this is what Jenna Blum has done.... Blum’s writing is exceptionally readable.
London Times

A deeply moving tale.... Blum’s beautifully lyrical, heart-wrenching story strikes a deep chord within those who read it, opening the reader’s eyes to the grim realities faced during this horrible time by Jews and the Germans in the Resistance who tried to help them. This novel will leave no reader untouched.
Tulsa World

Blum, who worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, takes a direct, unsentimental look at the Holocaust in her first novel. The narrative alternates between the present-day story of Trudy, a history professor at a Minneapolis university collecting oral histories of WWII survivors (both German and Jewish), and that of her aged but once beautiful German mother, Anna, who left her country when she married an American soldier. Interspersed with Trudy's interviews with German immigrants, many of whom reveal unabashed anti-Semitism, Anna's story flashes back to her hometown of Weimar. As Nazi anti-Jewish edicts intensify in the 1930s, Anna hides her love affair with a Jewish doctor, Max Stern. When Max is interned at nearby Buchenwald and Anna's father dies, Anna, carrying Max's child, goes to live with a baker who smuggles bread to prisoners at the camp. Anna assists with the smuggling after Trudy's birth until the baker is caught and executed. Then Anna catches the eye of the Obersturmf hrer, a high-ranking Nazi officer at Buchenwald, who suspects her of also supplying the inmates with bread. He coerces her into a torrid, abusive affair, in which she remains complicit to ensure her survival and that of her baby daughter. Blum paints a subtle, nuanced portrait of the Obersturmf hrer, complicating his sordid cruelty with more delicate facets of his personality. Ultimately, present and past overlap with a shocking yet believable coincidence. Blum's spare imagery is nightmarish and intimate, imbuing familiar panoramas of Nazi atrocity with stark new power. This is a poised, hair-raising debut.
Publishers Weekly

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this novel is that it is the author's first; its historical sweep, character delineations, and alternating time periods would lead one to believe that Blum had many others to her name. The German-born Anna and her young daughter, Trudy, who suffer a harrowing existence under the Nazi regime, are saved by a brutal SS officer and then an American soldier, who whisks them off to the wilds of Minnesota after the war. But the SS officer exacts a chilling price, and the immigrants are never really accepted in their new home, raising the question of what it means to be "saved." Trudy is obsessed with finding out more about her German heritage and the SS officer, who evidently fathered her, but Anna adamantly refuses to discuss the past. Then Trudy, now a divorced college professor, embarks on a project to interview Germans who survived the war and, in the process, makes an astonishing discovery that will affect the course of her life. Blum, who is half Jewish and worked for four years for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, tells her story in the present tense in both real time and flashbacks that impart immediacy without causing confusion. Highly recommended for all literary fiction collections and many popular collections as well. —Edward Cone
Library Journal

Anna's story is a gripping mystery in a page-turner that raises universal questions of shame, guilt, and personal responsibility. Hazel Rochman.
Booklist

An emotionally estranged mother and daughter are reconciled when the daughter learns the truth about her German mother's actions in WWII. Blum, who is half-Jewish and of German descent, worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation as an interviewer of Holocaust survivors-and her first fiction is suffused with details about life in wartime Germany, where her protagonists Anna Schlemmer and her daughter Trudy were both born. Trudy, now a professor of German history in the Twin Cities, is divorced and, as an only child, is responsible for Anna, who has to be put in a home soon after the death of her husband Jack, the American soldier she married at war's end. Anna rarely talks, and Trudy, who has seen a picture of her mother with a Nazi officer and a young Trudy, believing herself his daughter, is deeply ashamed. The two women tell their separate stories here as Trudy starts work on a project that involves interviewing Germans who were in Germany during the war. Anna recalls how, at 19, and living at home with her Nazi father in Weimar, she met Jewish doctor Max Stern. She hid him in her house, but Max bwas discovered. Anna, pregnant with Max's child, moved in with Mathilde, a baker helping the Resistance. After daughter Trudy was born in 1940, Anna also began working for the Resistance, delivering bread to a nearby camp for officers and retrieving hidden messages on the way home. But when she witnesses a brutal killing by Horst, an officer at the camp, and was seen by him, she became his mistress in order to save Trudy's life. Trudy finally learns the truth of her paternity—but her mother's long and insufficiently motivated silence about it isn't persuasive. An ambitious but flawed first outing.
Kirkus Reviews