Those Who Save Us

In September our book club read Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum.

 The book centers around a Mother and Daughter, but in different periods of time. Trudy and her mother Anna are originally from a small town in Germany and then after the WWII they moved to the United States. Trudy grows up, goes to school, gets a college degree and is a history professor with her focus on German history.

Source

The book switches time periods and narrators view throughout the whole book. Anna's life during the war living in Germany and then Trudy's life in current times as she explores the history of Women's role throughout the War.

Anna's story is very sad and the book is quite depressing. While you know certain arrangements were forced upon German woman during that time you are not really given too much detail. Or at least from my basic history classes in high school you don't. You understand what happened but you never really dive into the details....this book is a good reason why.

Trudy's life is slightly depressing as well but in a different way. It seems her main focus is to solve the mystery of who her Father is and find out about her Mother's life in Germany, something which Anna chooses never to speak of. When Trudy gets an opportunity to participate in a funded project regarding WWII she jumps at the chance and embarks on a series of interviews with German natives who now live in her local area. It's interesting and disturbing all at once.

This book was quite depressing. I found myself setting it down and wasting time on Pinterest for 5 minutes to just clear my mind. Luckily I was informed by the other members of my book club how bad this book so I chose to sit down and read it in two days.

Maybe it's because I was prepared for it, or perhaps I just assumed it'd be horrible considering you know what some women had to do during those times, but I didn't think it was horrible. I feel the book was very accurate in it's history and I thought the way the author showed Trudy's own backlash from the events surrounding the war was very interesting.

That being said I will never read this book again. I wasn't disturbed by it, nor was I left with a permanent scar from reading it. But I did need those 5 minute breaks quite often and the content is just not things I enjoy reading about.

Overall Grade - C.