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An estranged mother and daughter reunite to confront their family's role in World War II in this harrowing, unforgettable novel about lost love and inherited shame from New York Times bestselling author Jenna Blum.
For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by the guilt of her heritage, Trudy, now a professor of German history, begins investigating the past and finally unearths the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother's life.
Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother-daughter drama, Jenna Blum's Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive.
"An absorbing tale of two women's struggles with the burdens and responsibilities of remembrance." —Boston Globe
"In her compelling first novel, Jenna Blum forces a moral re-evaluation on her characters and on the reader. Cagily plotted between past and present, guilt and innocence, Those Who Save Us is a moving, unsentimental page turner." —Alison Leslie Gold, author of Fiet's Vase and co-author of Anne Frank Remembered
This information about Those Who Save Us was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jenna Blum is the New York Times bestselling author of The Stormchasers. Jenna is of German and Jewish descent and spent four years working for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, interviewing Holocaust survivors. She teaches fiction for Grub Street Writers. Please visit Jenna at www.jennablum.com, on Facebook and on Twitter: @jenna_blum.
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