Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

This  book is a page-turner, gripping, heart-wrenching, and thought provoking. Jenna Blum is  one of a few writers starting to brave the front of using a German perspective of the Holocaust. There are harrowing scenes in the book but if you have read other books about World War II  or has watched Steven Spielberg's movie, Schindler's List , these scenes  will not likely to shock you anymore. It is also a thriller, and although Trudy's part cannot measure the grip Anna's part has had on me, I had definitely turned pages, chapter after cliff-hanging chapter, and finished the book in one sitting in a day. Err, except when I had to fix coffee and when I had to go to the loo. I can understand why it has become one of the top favorites of Book Clubs all over America or why Jenna Blum is one of Oprah's Top 30 Women Writers. As a woman's literature, this is one of the best I've read, although I still consider Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance a WWII book favorite. I hope to come across her next book, The Stormchasers, in the future. The soonest possible.

Favorite Book Quotes:

“Heimat. The word means home in German, the place where one was born. But the term also conveys a subtler nuance, a certain tenderness. One's Heimat is not merely a matter of geography; it is where one's heart lies. ”

“…she should have known better than to tell him the truth. 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.“

“… It’s like being in a sort of club, isn’t it?  A bereavement club.  You don’t choose to join it; it’s thrust upon you.  And the members whose lives have been changed have more knowledge than those who aren’t in it, but the price of belonging is so terribly high.”

“Life is so often unfair and painful and love is hard to find and you have to take it whenever and wherever you can get it, no matter how brief it is or how it ends.”

“Why should they be permitted the cleansing of conscience that accompanies confession?  It is analogous to adultery; the guilty party, far from spilling out his misdeeds and easing his mind while injuring the innocent other, should have to live with the knowledge of what he has done.  A very particular kind of torture, subtle but ongoing.”

“The death of a parent, he says to it, is a profoundly life-altering experience, isn’t it? When I was a child, I often had this feeling of God’s in his Heaven: All’s right with the world—that’s Robert Browning. An English poet. But ever since my father died in the last war, I’ve awakened each morning knowing that I’ll never again feel that absolute security. Nothing is ever quite right, is it, after a parent dies? No matter how well things go, something always feels slightly off . . .”

The most provocative scene for me is actually a mellow one, yet, a statement when one refuses to be saved-the irony that made the title of this book more powerful and profound. When Rainer is leaving Trudy, when he says that happiness isn't for someone like him, it takes the story partly home. I can only imagine the burden of carrying the guilt of a sibling's death, watched in such a young age, the kind of death as cruel as it is. I cried buckets when **** was senselessly murdered in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (ok, so it is at the other end of Lit spectrum but you will see why I picked it on the next sentence), and I remember thinking then (this was on my first reading, since I've read the series several times already) that the Holocaust must have inspired the scene and **** could be a symbolism of the Jews. Ok, so we have all the answers that could be gathered about how that blight in History happened, but something in me is still so helpless, in disbelief, and questioning. How can a sane person really comprehend how a group of many people acted like psychopaths and killed millions of their fellow men--women, children... and babies? In this day and age, it is starting to become ludicrous to so many people when one race still acts superior to others, because this is inherently… well, scientifically and everything else, false. Why? Because of the Internet, and the phone, and it is now easy to see and understand that what makes up people in one island also makes up people in other islands in essential ways regardless of color, religion and language and no man is absolutely an island--except when it is man-made atrocity that cuts islands off from us and us from them, like war and religion. But it also relieves to understand that there were Germans then who had become complacent because most of the regular ones hadn't really known what Hitler really planned for the Jews; has no inkling of what's really happening until it was too late for them to follow their honor and morals; and was only able to scramble to be able to save their families from the effects of not just the war, but also of the insanity of mad men who believed the common falsehood that one race can be better than that of their brothers. 

Updates:

Jennifer Blum is writing the screenplay for the film adaptation of her first book, Those Who Save Us. It is going to be made into a film and I am already excited to watch it.