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Those Who Save Us
Those Who Save Us
Those Who Save Us
Audiobook15 hours

Those Who Save Us

Written by Jenna Blum

Narrated by Suzanne Toren

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

Haunted by an old family photo of her mother and a high-ranking Nazi officer, historian Trudy Swenson begins to dig deep into the past to uncover the wartime experiences her mother refuses to talk about. Author Jenna Blum has worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation for four years. Her novel received exceptional reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly. "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
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 18, 2008
ISBN9781436151337
Those Who Save Us
Author

Jenna Blum

Jenna Blum is the New York Times and # 1 internationally bestselling author of novels Those Who Save Us, The Stormchasers, and The Lost Family. She was voted one of Oprah readers’ Top 30 Women Writers on Oprah.com and is the co-founder/ CEO of literary social media marketing company A Mighty Blaze. Jenna earned her MA at Boston University in Creative Writing and has taught writing workshops at Grub Street Writers for over 20 years. She interviewed Holocaust survivors for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation and is a professional public speaker, traveling nationally and internationally to speak about her work. Jenna is based in downtown Boston, where she lives across from Woodrow’s bench and is currently a dog mom to her black Lab puppy Henry Higgins. For more about Jenna, please visit www.jennablum.com and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  

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Reviews for Those Who Save Us

Rating: 4.044852096228338 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A great listen! Clear narration! Was left at the end wanting more! More of a conclusion
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful historical background with a great story! Very well done! ?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Very good. Got a little teary @ times with the reading of what happened to Jews in WWII. Left some loose ends hanging in the story line that I wished had been concluded. As much as I enjoyed it I could NOT stand that the entire book did not have a single quotation mark in it! All of the dialogue throughout the book was written without quotes. Made it hard to decipher sometimes as you couldn't tell who was saying what and it all ran together.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Engaging. I loved it. I could not stop listening. !!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Really “nice” book - interesting to hear the war from the other side
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Dr Trudy Swenson is a professor of history at the Univ of Minnesota. After she goes home for her father’s funeral she begins to question her history, and her mother’s silence. She has always know that Jack wasn’t her real father – that he had married Anna and brought her and her daughter from Weimar Germany to the USA after WW2. But the questions about her past will not be silenced, and a research project to record interviews with German survivors of the war forces Trudy to confront her past.The novel is told in dual timelines: the adult Trudy in 1990s Minnesota, and her mother, Anna, as a young woman in war-torn Germany (1941-1944). The reader is all too aware of Trudy’s past, while watching Trudy struggle to make sense of her dreams, her vague recollections, and the one clue she has found among her mother’s belongings. I was not expecting much from this “book-club favorite;” I’ve been disappointed by so many books that were popular with book clubs. But I’m certainly glad I put my pre-conceived notions aside and read it. I found complex issues, well-developed characters, and a compelling narrative. Are we doomed to love “Those who save us,” despite their otherwise reprehensible behavior? I was nearly as frustrated by Anna’s obstinate silence as Trudy was. Learning her story, what she felt forced to do to save her child (and herself) gave me some understanding into her character, her motives, her fears, and her reluctance to examine the past. However, my sympathies lie more with Trudy, whose life and potential for happiness is so damaged by the secret Anna refuses to reveal. And I am left wondering whether Jack ever made peace with Anna’s past … and if so, how?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent, and a good companion read to 'All the light we cannot see'.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Jenna Blum's THOSE WHO SAVE US (2004) is a completely absorbing novel that deals with the camps of the Holocaust on an extremely personal level, specifically Buchenwald. The two central characters are Anna and Trudy, a German mother and daughter, with the narrative shifting between the two, flashing back and forth from the 1940s, with Anna as a young mother in Weimar trying to keep her child safe during the war, to 1997, finding the now adult Trudy teaching German History at a university in Minneapolis, and Anna still keeping secrets about their wartime lives. There is, early on, a love story cut short, followed by a complex, brutal relationship with an SS officer until Buchenwald is liberated by the Americans, and Anna meets Jack, an American lieutenant of German descent, a farmer from Minnesota. The story is rich in aurhentic details and strong, well-defined characters. It's a book hard to put down. My highest recommendation.- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A dense book covering a heavy subject; are all ordinary German citizens during the Third Reich willing collaborators or were they coerced into doing it? The plot divides back and forth between Anna and her daughter Trudie. Anna's trauma is inadvertently passed onto Trudie who expresses it in other ways throughout her adult life without even realizing it. I enjoyed how both storylines go hand in hand. It's like watching cause and effect throughout the book.The pace is slow, but it's not dull nor boring. There is lots of sympathy towards Anna and her ordeals. She's shielded Trudie from potential pain and has tried to make the best of it and giving her the most normal life she can possibly give. Her devotion is what keeps her going. You can feel Anna's detachment throughout the book, rightfully so considering what she had to go through to survive. Unfortunately what she did put her in a difficult position and others saw it as Anna being a collaborator. At the end of the book though, everything is finally turned full circle and the way Blum closes the knots was well done. I wish it had turned out differently for Anna, especially when she goes to the US but it seems she'll be just fine. This is a good one for historical fiction fans. Keep in mind the subject matter may not be for everyone.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another devastating story about what women will do to survive in dire situations beyond their control, and the way in which others inevitably judge them.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

    I finished and I have to tell you that I was really disappointed with this one. I am going to give this book 4 stars for the story and the way that it seemed to focus on many of the German victims of WWII, especially the women and children.

    I had such high hopes andd all was going well, in my opinion, until Trudy and Rainer hooked up. I realize that Trudy was searching for validation, understanding etc...but this just did not seem to fit with me.

    I really felt that the book started to spiral down down down after that. I was hoping to find out more about Ruth and about Thomas. I felt that those two characters were very under utilized. The ending was just two contrived for me with meeting Felix Pfieffer.


  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I was a bit disappointed with the end of this book, because after posing the question early in the story of what it means for a woman to know her father was an SS officer, the woman conveniently discovers what the reader has known all along, almost since the start of the story, that her father is actually a Jew. So, what would be different either way for her as a grown woman in the US? How is she, and by extension real people fathered by SS officers and other monsters of history, to deal with the fact of such ancestry?
    Still, such a question is perhaps a bit weighty for any one author to be expected to answer, and this book does provide an interesting and nuanced perspective on what life was like in Germany during WW2 for women, including women for whom resisting the Nazis openly was not always a viable option. I wished I was teaching a world lit class while reading this book, because it would make for some excellent discussion and interesting class papers.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    World War II set stories are among my favorites, and Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum does not disappoint. Trudy has always been bewildered by her mother, Anna, a taciturn woman who refuses to talk about her life during the war. During a research project meant to discover the stories of ordinary Germans who lived through the war, Trudy stumbles across the remarkable story of her own mother, a woman who saved herself and her child from certain starvation or worse, but at what cost? An excellent addition to the genre, Blum’s novel is a haunting exploration of the inescapable moral dilemmas that riddle lives torn apart by war.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I was hoping for some plausible explanation, I was hoping for an ending that offered some clarification. I finished the book disappointed.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Anna, barely an adult in late 1930's Germany, falls in love with Max, a Jewish doctor. They enjoy a brief love affair before he is captured & sent to a nearby concentration camp. Anna soon learns she is pregnant and must find a way to support herself & her young daughter, Trudy, in wore-torn Germany.Fast forward 50 years. Trudy, now a middle-aged adult living in the United States, is a college professor of German history. However, her relationship with her mother is strained, largely due to the fact that Anna will not talk about her past. This book had been sitting on my shelf for almost 10 years. I'd heard nothing but good things about it. While it is very well-written and I did enjoy it, I think I had it hyped up a little too much in my head and thus, I was mildly disappointed. The story alternates between past and present, between Anna's and Trudy's points of view. It has a slow-developing story line and asks the reader to examine just what would you do, or what would be considered acceptable, in order to save the life of yourself and your child. And then, could you live with yourself after making those decisions? This is not an uplifting story, but it does bring to light a cruel reality in a country's, and its people's, troubled history.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Anna falls in love with a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Anna hides him in her home but her father turns in in to the Gestapo. When Anna discovers she is pregnant, she leaves home. Anna finds a home with Mathilda but soon fate intervenes and Anna does what she has to do in order for her and her daughter to survive. For many years she keeps her past to herself, refusing to tell her daughter about her father. When she finally talks, her daughter is shocked to find out the entire story. The author is often graphic with sexual situations. I could do without that. I realize that sex is part of the story but I would prefer it wasn't so graphic. That said, the author took me to Germany during WWII. I was there with Anna, I was part of the resistance. When I put the book away, I had to take a moment to gather myself and realize I was living in the 21st century.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    story of a german woman whose mother lived through Nazi germany and was the mistress of a SS to survive. Good writing in past in Germany, but did not believe the present with daughter's life in Minnesota
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In 1943, Anna slips her father's dachshund some chocolate, knowing that it will poison the dog.After this, it's hard to care about her despite the horrors that she faces, first with her Nazi with dementiafather, then with the SS. Max, the Good doctor, enters and gives her a life and she has his child.She hides this Jewish man in her father's house where he is predictably caughtand sent to the Camps. She works in a bakery to support her child and to help the owner with The Resistance.When the owner dies, her life is taken over by an SS officer untilthe War ends and she becomes the wife of Jack, an Allied man, who marries her and moves her and her daughter, Trudy, to Minnesota.When Jack finally confronts her with her relationship with the SS,she totally inexplicably does NOT tell him about Max and herrole with The Resistance. This totally weakens the plot, notably because she also does not tell Trudy about her real father, letting her believe that he was a Nazi Officer. The "WHY" of her reasoning is never explained. It only allows the plot to meander on into coincidence as a solution.Why would she hurt Jack and Trudy so much with her silence?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Beautiful woven tale about family, heartbreak, love and the secrets they keep. I'm not typically drawn to WWII era settings for novels I read, but I'm so glad I made the jump on this one. The characters are so alive on the page and the story is absolutely riveting. A must read.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This book started out with promise, but then it dwindled away. There were a number of things that annoyed me about "Those Who Save Us", the first being the lack of quotation marks. Why were they left out? Having to stop and reread a passage to work out who was speaking became tiring, and frustrating, very quickly. As for the characters they were all bland and annoying. I never connected with Anna and I liked her daughter Trudie even less. The only character I has some sympathy for was Jack because I hated how Anna treated him. Then there were the sex scenes. Yes, I get that Anna became an unwilling mistress to an SS commandant, but really, did the author have to be so graphic on so many occasions, especially when other important details were left out? Finally, the ending . . . what a disappointment. It was weak, rushed and unsatisfying. I enjoyed the historical aspect of this book showing the extraordinary lengths people went through to survive this terrible period in time and protect the ones they loved, but there are far better holocaust novels out there.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    My F2F seems to love reading books dealing with WWI and the holocaust. This book, however, was different in that it dealt with the German side of the equation. What did the Germans go through and tolerate who were left in the cities that the Nazis decimated? To what lengths would they go to in order to feed their families and protect their children? This book tells the story nicely.


    **SPOILERS**


    However, I wanted more resolution at the end between the mother and daughter. I wanted to know why Anna refused to talk to Trudy. Why did Trudy change the spelling of her name? Would she ever know truly who her father was and what happened to him? Why did the townspeople dislike Trudy so, even to the point of disgracing her after Jack's funeral? What happened to the cameraman after the project was complete?

    This book could almost have a sequel, for all of the unanswered questions. However, there isn't enough story left to justify another book; just may unanswered questions.

    With that in mind, my rating is 3 instead of 4 looks. It was a very enjoyable book, but I could have used about 50 more pages to tie up loose ends. Recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a good book. It was about a mother Anna and her daughter Trudie. They were both German and lived in Germany during WWII. This was about how far a mother will go to protect her daughter. The things she will endure. How you grow to love what you hate. The book moves back and forth between 1996 and 1940's. It goes through Anna's life in Germany and her current life in the U.S. The book was very well written and the characters well defined and likable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I just can't deny my disappointment when reaching the ending of the book. The whole time while I was reading this book, it was difficult to stop reading. If time was on my side, I would have finished it in just one reading session. The story really pulled me in. But when reaching the end... I flipped the page, sure there was at least one page to come, and seeing that was the end. It was such a disappointment. I would have expected Trudie to go home, finding her mom in the study or in her bedroom, and just standing in the door looking at that beautiful, mysterious person she calls mom. Thinking about everything that happened that day, not having the energy to argue with her about how she never told her about the past, about her father. Just standing there and maybe leave to her room, or maybe whispering "ich liebe dich mutti". The ending would still remained open, you still wouldn't know if Anna eventually tells the truth or not, but it would have been an ending to the book. But compliment to the author to really dig into the history and implement so many facts and truths.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    For 50 years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany in during World War II. When her daughter Trudy was 3 years old, they were liberated by an American soldier; Anna marries him and they move to Minnesota. Trudy's only evidence of their past in Germany is an old photo that her mother keeps hidden away in a drawer, a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer.When the story moves into the 1990's, Trudy is now a professor of German history, and driven by the guilt of her heritage, begins to investigate the past and finally uncovers the heartbreaking truth of her mother's life, and what she had to endure in order for both her and Trudy to survive.I can't really say that I "enjoyed" this book; how can one really "enjoy" reading about abuse and suffering? But it was a well written story, and one that really makes you think about the difficult decisions that those living through the Holocaust had to make in order to survive. This story was hard to put down once I started reading it, very intriguing. This is one of the most powerful and sobering novels I have ever read about the Holocaust.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book reiterates my theory that women and children are the worst casualties of the brutalities of every war among men.

    More than just a story of survival but a deep psychological study on a woman's (Anna) life in the midst of war, and the damages left with her in it's aftermath.

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I'm only about 50 pages into this book, and already I have mixed feelings about it--not because of the subject matter, but because of the writing. We'll see...

    ...So far the writing includes forced metaphors, awkward dialogue, and a preoccupation with bodily functions and related substances. Ahem.

    12/18: Hate to say it, but I'm looking forward to finishing this book so that I can move on to something better. As I believe other reviewers have noted, this seems to be a great idea for a book in the hands of a writer who's just not up to it. Sorry, Ms. Blum.

    It has improved, I'll give it that.

    Final review: Good topic, but this book is just awful. The character development is poor, the dialogue is weak. There's enough gratuitous sex--even without the scenes between Anna and the Nazi officer, which perhaps you could argue are necessary to the story--for a cheap romance novel. This is a sadly inelegant book that, given the subject matter, could have been a whole lot better.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany. Her daughter was only three when liberated by American soldiers and went to live in Minnesota. Trudy, the daughter, wonders about her mother's secrets. she decides to writes book about German's who survived WWII. A mother/daughter drama.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I loved the cover of the book and the premise: the story of Nazi German told from a German perspective. However, the book was simply a disappointment. First, Trudy, as one of the main characters in the book, was so unlikable. Yes, she had all that hidden angst, all that hidden guilt, but in spite of that seemed so shallow and simply unbelievable. Granted her relationship with her mother was strained, but just leaving her at an unknown nursing home and thoughtlessly turning the family farm over to a real estate agent and then going on her merry way seemed really callous and not realistic.The story of Anna, her mother, during the war years was much more compelling, but that too seemed filled with unrealistic situations. The idea of a much older Jewish doctor having relations with a young German girl seems very far fetched. The German Nazi is so much of a stereotype. And, Anna's very twisted relationship with him is a strange blend of hate and infatuation. I agree with many of those that gave this book very negative reviews. The many explicit details of twisted sex seem very unnecessary. This is a case of too much, too often. Detailed sex scenes sometimes have a legitimate purpose; here they only seem embarrassing and cheap.The final chapters of the book also are filled with just too much coincidence. Trudy's sexual relationship with a Jewish man and the chances of meeting a man who knew of her mother many years ago seem contrived.Everyone in this book is either evil or "innocent". Even the church ladies in Minnesota come across as evil. Perhaps the early years of Anna being in their midst might be cause for suspicion, but after many years no one showing up after the funeral of Anna's husband seems to say "once evil; always evil." I wish I could say I liked this book, but must admit, it was a real disappointment.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Trudy, a history professor, is conducting a project based on interviews with German WWII survivors. Her German mother, Anna, does her best to live her life without causing or feeling any more harm or hurt; therefore, she doesn't share any stories from the past. Trudy is able to discover more through the interviews. The story is told in alternating chapters of the past and present.This was another interesting viewpoint - surviving WWII Germans. I found the story as a whole to be very good, but it didn't draw me in like most of the WWII stories I've read. The main characters were clearly defined, and often, I could understand their emotions, but didn't feel them. Also, I was disappointed that there were so many gratuitous s*x scenes. I think I understand what the author was trying to convey, yet sometimes less is more. I believe this was one of those times. Overall - a good book, but nothing I would rave about.Originally posted on: Thoughts of Joy
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have always had a strange obsession with the Holocaust. A fascination that is yet to be satiated. This story of Anna and Trudie has been a generous and satisfying portion for that hunger. This story told in past and present by mother and daughter of their experience in wartime Germany and present day Minnesota is heart-wrenching and horrific. Anna is desperately hiding the truth while Trudie is determined to find it. Be warned of repeated detailed sexual scenes throughout the book that some readers may find distasteful. Aside from that, if you liked Sarah's Key you will also enjoy this book. I give this book 4 stars because of my huge interest in the subject matter.