The Holocaust fiction I bought and read the night before Elie Wiesel died...

Heavy summer reading...

So, when I saw a note for 80% off select Kindle books, I had to take advantage of it. I saw Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum, and the "book jacket" description sounded like it appealed to my interest in historical fiction:

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has 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.

What I didn't realize was just how "real" this book would be. In the first few pages, the reader meets Anna and Trudy at Jack's funeral, and all that is clear is that theirs is a house filled with silence. Then, the book flashes back to Weimar in 1939, as Anna begins seeing Max, a Jewish doctor who helped her save her Nazi father's dog. We learn how Anna falls in love with Max and the lengths she goes to in order to try to save him...and her unborn child.

But when Max is taken to Buchenwald, Anna must balance her desire to save her love and the other innocent men in the prison camp from her need to protect her child. For a while, she makes a "noble" choice, giving up her home to live a life serving the resistance and raising her "tainted" child, but soon the horrors of Buchenwald spill out of the camp...

I'd read a bit about Buchenwald because this was the final stop for Elie Wiesel, whose memoir Night is the subject of study in one of my classes. In many ways, it was a "typical" concentration camp, with forced labor, arbitrary executions, and terrible conditions. However, the book shared these facts (and the fact that this was
one of the sites for Nazi medical experimentation) in a manner that showed just how "everyday" this was for the people who lived around the camp. It was an interesting historical fiction perspective. In the midst of Anna's story (revealed through flashbacks to the past interrupted by Trudy's story in the present), the reader sees not only those who try to help the men in the camps, but also those who perpetrate the atrocities...and those who lived around the camps. When Anna has to choose between death and the advances of the Obersturmfuhrer, the reader sympathizes with her choice.

However, the rest of the town knows little about Anna's choices outside of what they see in public, and Trudy knows nothing about that time except what she remembers in little flashbacks and nightmares about her childhood. When Trudy helps another professor with an interview project hearing from survivors of the war in Germany, we also see how complicated that time was for "everyday" citizens.

What struck me was that while this book was billed as a sort of tragic romance, I found it to be just plain tragic. The details are graphic, and while this is likely authentic, it makes parts of the book hard to stomach. When rape comes up, it is explicitly described, and while this shows how sadistic some people were and how helpless others were, it isn't easy to read. (So be warned--adult content is very much a part of this book!) In a non-spoiler, I appreciated how the author detailed what happened after the camp was liberated and the residents of Wiemar were made to go through the camp. This is a detail that is often left out of history books, and while it seemed just to make people face up to what they did (or didn't do), the author presented this in such a way as to create sympathy for bystanders like Anna.

I don't want to spoil the ending, but I will say that the author does a good job of dangling the promise of a happy ending in front of the reader, and the need to know if and how the realities of Anna's past would be revealed to Trudy kept me going through the tough stuff.

Not exactly light summer fare, but an interesting historical fiction.

Happy Reading!