Those Who Save Us

Author: Jenna Blum
Stars: 3.5
Review by: Kate

Trudy is a middle-aged professor of German history who has some memories of being a young child in Weimar, Germany, during the war, and an old family portrait of herself, her mother, and an SS officer. Her mother refuses to talk about what happened, so Trudy begins an oral history project, talking to Germans who lived through the war, as part of her attempt to make sense of her memories and understand her mother's silence.

Trudy's story in the present day is interwoven with her mother's story from the war. Anna had a daughter out of wedlock fathered by a Jewish doctor she hid from the Nazis, worked for the underground German resistance, and eventually caught the eye of a brutal SS officer. In exchange for food, which became more scarce as the war went on, and gifts he brought for Trudy, Anna became his whore. She describes in stomach-turning detail what he did to her for all those years, and why she let it happen.

This was a difficult book to read - I went from being sympathetic to sickened and back again. The details of Anna's story are appalling, as are some of the interviews Trudy conducts with other Germans who survived the war. But it certainly begs an interesting question - when you're faced with true evil, do you fight for what's right no matter the cost, or do you keep your head down and do whatever you need to do to protect your family and your own life?