Those Who Save Us (Blum)

Those Who Save Us
Jenna Blum, 2004
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156031660


Summary 
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. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—N/A
• Reared—in Montclair, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Kenyon College; M.A., Boston University
• Awards—Harold Ribalow Prize by Hadassah Magazine
• Currently—Boston, Massachusetts

Jenna Blum is of German and Jewish descent. She worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation for four years, interviewing Holocaust survivors. She currently teaches at Boston University and runs fiction workshops for Grub Street Writers. (From the publisher.)

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New York Times bestselling author Jenna Blum has been writing professionally since 1986, when her short story "The Legacy of Frank Finklestein" won First Prize in Seventeen magazine's national fiction contest. Jenna's debut novel Those Who Save Us was published by Harcourt in 2004. In October 2007 the novel, called "the little book that could" in Publishers Weekly, jumped onto the Boston Globe and the New York Times bestseller lists. 

Those Who Save Us won the Harold Ribalow Prize, awarded by Hadassah magazine and adjudged by Elie Wiesel, in 2005; foreign rights have been sold in Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, France, Italy, Israel, Norway, and Spain.  Those Who Save Us was also the Borders Book Club Selection for Summer 2007.  A World War II mother-daughter story inspired by Jenna’s German and Jewish heritage and the interviews she conducted for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, Those Who Save Us is a national book club favorite and continues to hold steady on the New York Times bestseller list.

Jenna, who always wanted to be a writer, grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, the eldest daughter of a broadcast journalist and a concert pianist. She was educated at Kenyon College (B.A., English) and Boston University (M.A., Creative Writing) and published short fiction and nonfiction in numerous literary magazines and newspapers, including Seventeen, the Boston Globe, Improper Bostonian, Poets & Writers, Meridian, Faultline, Prairie Schooner, Kenyon Review, Bellingham Review, and Briar Cliff Review, which twice nominated Jenna's stories for a Pushcart Prize.

Jenna taught Creative and Communications Writing for six years at Boston University, where she was also the Fiction Editor of the literary magazine AGNI.  Jenna, still a Boston resident, now teaches at local writing school Grub Street Writers, where she has run classes for over a decade; she teaches the master novel workshop and writes writers' advice columns for the Grub Street Free Press.  Jenna also travels nationally to speak about Those Who Save Us and visits book clubs whether in person or by phone; she has attended over 800 book clubs in the greater Boston area alone. (From the author's website.)

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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

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Discussion Questions 
1. How would you categorize Those Who Save Us: as a war story, a love story, a mother-daughter story? Why? How is it different from other novels that address the issues surrounding the Holocaust? What new perspectives does it offer?

2. Discuss the novel's title, Those Who Save Us. In what ways do the characters save each other in the novel, and who saves whom? How does Blum play with the concept of being saved, being safe, being a savior?

3. In the beginning of the novel, what is Anna's attitude towards the Jewish people of Weimar? Does her attitude change? If so, where does this transformation occur and why?

4. While she is hiding Max, Anna thinks she would "pay a high price to be plain, for her looks pose an ever-greater danger to both herself and Max." Do you see Anna's beauty as a blessing or a curse? What role does it play in shaping her destiny? How do her looks affect her relationships with Max, Gerhard, the Obersturmführer, Trudy?

5. When living with Mathilde, Anna asks why Mathilde risks her life to feed the Buchenwald prisoners "when everyone else turn a blind eye." Why does Mathilde take this risk? Why does Anna? Do you think American women would react differently than German women in similar circumstances, and if so, why?

6. What are Anna's sexual reactions to the Obersturmführer, and what effect do they have on how she sees herself? How do they shape Anna's relationship with Trudy? ... Do you see Anna's relationship with the Obersturmführer as primarily sexual, or are there places in the novel where their relationship transcends the sexual?

7. Do you see the Obersturmführer as a monster or as human? What are his vulnerabilities? To what degree is he a product of his time? If the Obersturmführer had been born in contemporary America, what might he be doing today?

8. Toward the end of the novel, Anna thinks that the Obersturmführer "has blighted her ability to love." Do you think he has forever affected her ability to love Jack? To love Trudy? What are Anna's real feelings for the Obersturmführer, and what are his true feelings toward Anna and her daughter?

9. Are Trudy's difficulties with her mother caused only by the secrets Anna keeps? If the past had not come between them, what would their relationship have been like? In what ways are Trudy and Anna typical of mothers and daughters everywhere? What parallels can you draw between their relationship and yours with your own mother?

10. Trudy has been familiar with shame all her life, both her own shame and Anna's. How does Trudy learn about shame from Anna? Does Trudy's shame stem solely from her suspicions about her Nazi parentage or from her German heritage as well? How has her shame manifested in her adult lifestyle?

11. Anna's consistent response to Trudy's questions is, "The past is dead, and better it remain so." Why does Anna keep her silence? Is this fair to Trudy? Were you surprised that Anna refuses to talk about her past even when she has been confronted and deemed a heroine by Mr. Pfeffer? In her position, would you do the same?

12. During his German Project interview, Rainer plays what he calls "a dirty trick" on Trudy by reading a prepared statement about his aunt's experience and eventual deportation to Auschwitz instead of telling his own story. Why does he do this? Why is Rainer so angry with Trudy? Is he angry with her? Do you think his anger is justified?

13. Why does Trudy get involved with Rainer? Is Trudy and Rainer's relationship a healthy one? When Rainer departs for Florida, he says, "I do not deserve this .... I am not meant to be this happy," a statement with which Trudy agrees. If Trudy and Rainer's relationship were not affected by their wartime pasts, would it have been happy? Would it have existed at all?

14. What does each of Trudy's interview subjects-Frau Kluge, Rose-Grete Fischer, Rainer, Felix Pfeffer-represent about German actions during the war and how Germans feel in retrospect? What does Trudy learn from her German subjects?

15. At the end of Those Who Save Us, the characters' fates are ambiguous; Trudy, for instance, is left in a "vacuum between one part of life ending and another coming to take its place." Why does Blum do this? What statement, if any, is she trying to make? Do you feel that the novel's end is a happy one for Trudy? For Anna? Why or why not? And what do you think has happened to the Obersturmführer?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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