@review  ANITA PADDOCK

Those Who Save Us
Jenna Blum
479 pages

Jenna Blum, the author of this book first published in 2004, is of Jewish-German descent.  She once worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation interviewing Holocaust survivors, and I suspect that after that experience, this was something she simply had to write.  And this novel is something you simply must read.

Much of the story is set in Germany during World War II.  Anna, a beautiful German woman falls in love with a Jewish doctor and has a baby named Trudy.  The doctor is sent to a Buchenwald concentration camp near her home, and Anna and her baby hide in a bakery with a woman who sells bread to the Gestapo and secretly delivers bread to prisoners in the Buchenwald camp. The baker is eventually killed by the Gestapo, and Anna is left to run the bakery. Supplies for the business dwindle, and Anna is forced to become the mistress of an officer of the SS (the Nazi Party’s protection squadron) in order to survive.

When the war is almost over, and American soldiers arrive and find the concentration camps. Jack, an American soldier, falls in love with Anna, marries her and brings his new family back to his Minnesota farm. Anna isn’t accepted by the townspeople, so she rarely leaves her new home. She keeps her past a secret from her husband and her daughter. Trudy remembers bits and pieces of her life in Germany, but she doesn’t know who her biological father is, nor does she understand why she and her mother are shunned.

Trudy grows up to become a professor of history at the University of Minnesota.  After Jack dies, she places her mother in a nursing home, but she eventually has to bring her mother home to live with her. 

She doesn’t have a close relationship with her mother because of all the secrets her mother keeps about her early life. Trudy fears that her mother was  promiscuous, and her biological father was a cruel SS officer. That belief has always haunted Trudy. 

Trudy begins an oral history project at the university and advertises for people of German descent to participate in recollections about living through the war. Trudy finds that these interviews are disturbing and causes her to remember her own early years in Germany.

The novel moves from Anna’s story in the 1940s to Trudy’s story in  present day Minnesota. Trudy finds that the truth she is searching for lies somewhere in between, just as the truth nearly always does in real life.