Those Who Save Us

My New Year's resolution for 2012 is to write more. Because that's so vague, I'm making it my goal to update this blog at least once a week. So here we are, six days into the new year, and here I am, updating my blog. Now I just have to keep this up for an additional fifty-one weeks!

One of the most intriguing books I read this past year is Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum. This story centers on a mother (Anna) and daughter (Trudy) who immigrated to the US from Germany at the end of WWII, when Anna married an American soldier. Trudy was only a preschooler at the time and her memories of life in Germany are hazy. Anna refuses to speak of the past and will not answer Trudy's questions about the identity of her father.

These mysteries unfold both through adult Trudy's research as into Germans' experiences of WWII through her position as history professor and also by means of flashbacks from Anna's perspective. Author Jenna Blum's previous work as an historian for Spielberg's Shoah Foundation serves her well, as she weaves a complicated psychological novel that is searing and thought-provoking. Blum shows us that it's easy to judge the past, but often, for those living it, there were no easy answers.

During the war, Anna is merely a teenager with a baby. She lives with a baker and helps smuggle bread to prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp, which adjoins her village. When the baker is caught and executed, Anna knows that she will be targetted next. In order to survive and keep her baby fed, she allows a Nazi officer to use her sexually, and he returns to her, again and again, for over a year. Although the sex is sometimes violent and not truly consensual, the officer also brings her and Trudy clothing, food and gifts. Others in the village fear or despise Anna for being the "Nazi's whore."

When the village is liberated, an American soldier falls in love with Anna, and she marries him and immigrates to the US with Trudy. Despite her husband's kindness, Anna finds it impossible to extricate herself from her memories of the past: "She can never tell him what she started to say: that we come to love those who save us. For although Anna does believe this is true, the word that stuck in her throat was not save but shame" (445).