Tuesday, May 20, 2008 5:11 PM CDT
REVIEW: 'Those Who Save Us' By Jenna Blum
Review by Juanita Sherwood
A child needs food, clothing, shelter, loving care, a bit of joy now and then, a sense of security ...
To what lengths would one go as a parent to provide one or more of the above for one or more children in the midst of a crisis? What would it take to provide the bare necessities, to keep oneself alive to care for the child(ren), to hope that a better day is coming?
In your mind, travel back to Germany in 1939, to where Nazis are in power and laws have been passed restricting the lives of German citizens. Imagine being a good-looking, young German woman whose mother is deceased and whose father is an important lawyer wanting to ingratiate himself with those in power.
Then imagine falling in love with a Jewish physician, a relationship that is banned by law because you are not Jewish. Further imagine that you offer to hide your lover in your home on your father’s estate. You successfully do so for a time, but eventually find that your father has turned him into the authorities. As a final challenge, you find that you are pregnant by the man you love.
That is the situation in which Anna Brandt, in “Those Who Save Us” by Jenna Blum, finds herself. She, who has been used to a life of privilege, must now find a way to support herself, the infant that she carries, and keep her secret from those in authority because, after all, she has broken the law.
She turns to a kindly widow who runs a bakery who agrees to take her in as an assistant. There the baby is born. Meanwhile, all the Jewish residents and others in the neighborhood who have displeased the authorities in some way are taken away, some to a nearby camp that comes to be called Buchenwald.
The baker supplies the SS officers who run the camp with bread and other pastries in exchange for rationed baking supplies. Anna takes over the bakery when the owner is killed and is befriended by the camp commander, eventually becoming his mistress.
Skip to the 21st century: the daughter Trudy is now a middle-aged professor of German history at a university in Minnesota. Her stepfather, an American soldier who helped liberate Anna’s hometown, has died. Her mother refuses to speak of her and Trudy’s past life in Germany during the war.
Trudy knows of the existence of a photograph showing her, her mother, and a Nazi officer whom she assumes is her father, but was too young during the war years to have remembered any of that life with accuracy. What she discovers about her own past in her quest to assist a colleague in the history department with a special project will reveal surprises in her own family history and smooth over rough edges in her relationship with her mother.
The book is a powerful reminder of struggles faced by those in the past who survived great difficulties and their struggles to put the past behind them. The book’s format of skipping from the past to the present and back is an effective way to contrast the then and now of this intense story.
This book is for those who appreciate a historical setting and/or mother-daughter relationship issues. “Those Who Save Us” is an intense read, but well worth your time.
Sherwood of Charleston is a retired reading teacher.
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