Those Who Save Us

I keep coming back to stories about families that do not talk. My grandmother kept a box of photographs from the war years that nobody was allowed to explain, and every time I asked about the men in the pictures the conversation changed subjects. Jenna Blum wrote a whole novel about that silence, and about the cost of keeping it, and it does not let anyone off the hook, including the reader.

The book was first published in 2004, and I read the Harper Perennial paperback. It moves between two lives: Anna, a German woman surviving the war in Weimar, and her daughter Trudy, a German history professor in Minnesota in the 1990s who has spent her adult life trying to find out what her mother will not say. The chapters alternate, and for a long time you think you know how the two timelines fit together. By the end you understand that you were holding the pieces upside down.

What surprised me is how unsentimental the book is. There are no noble speeches, no easy villains who are easy to hate, and no moment where anyone is washed clean. Blum worked for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation before she wrote fiction, and it shows in the interviews that run through the novel. People say small, evasive, human things. The horror lives in what they leave out.

The photograph in the drawer

Trudy lives in Minnesota with a version of her past that has holes in it she could drive a car through. She was three years old in 1945 when she and her mother were liberated, and they came to America with an American soldier, Jack Schlemmer, who married Anna and raised Trudy as his own daughter. Trudy has no memories of Germany that she trusts. What she has instead is a single photograph that her mother cannot explain and will not discuss: Anna, young and beautiful, Trudy as a toddler on her lap, and standing behind them, smiling for the camera, an officer in the uniform of the SS.

The photograph indexes everything wrong in the house. When Trudy was a child and asked who the man was, her mother said "nobody" and put the picture away. When Trudy was older, Anna took it out again, but never said a word about it. The gap between the image and the silence is the wound the novel circles. Blum treats that silence not as a mystery to be cracked for entertainment but as a kind of weather in the house. It shapes how Anna holds herself, how Trudy flinches around history, and how neither of them manages to love anyone cleanly.

Trudy, for her part, is not an easy heroine. She is prickly, depressive, hungry for approval, and drawn to men who cannot give her what she needs. She teaches German history to American students because she needs to know what her mother lived through, though she also suspects she is doing it as a kind of penance for something she did not do. She has no children, a fact the novel keeps quietly in view, as if the war were still deciding how many people the family would get to have.

A love story in Weimar

The chapters set in the past begin in 1939, when Anna is not yet twenty and Weimar still pretends to be the town of Goethe and music and careful gardens. Anna's family is privileged and cold, and her father Gerhard has already joined the party, mostly, as the novel suggests, because it is the way to keep what is his. Into this world walks Max Stern, a young Jewish doctor who treats Anna's mother and who falls in love with Anna in the slow, careful way of people who do not yet know how short their time is.

The romance is the warmest thing in the book, and Blum uses it deliberately. Anna and Max have coffee, argue about music, touch hands in hallways. It reads like a normal love story for a hundred pages before the world starts closing the doors. Then the walls arrive: Jews are barred from this and that, Max loses his practice, Anna's father grows more open in his cruelty, and the options shrink to hiding or flight. Anna smuggles Max into the house and hides him in a storage room, which is both an act of love and an act of lunacy, because her father would turn him in in a heartbeat. He does.

Gerhard discovers Max and denounces him to the authorities. Max is taken to Buchenwald. And Anna, pregnant with his child, is left to carry a secret that has just become a life sentence. The scenes where she learns what has happened are the first place the novel earns its reputation for directness. Anna does not scream or tear at her clothes. She goes quiet, in the way that will define the next fifty years of her life.

The bakery on the square

Disgraced and pregnant, Anna finds shelter with Mathilde Staudt, who runs a bakery in Weimar and who, it becomes clear, is part of a quiet network of people moving bread and messages to forced laborers and prisoners. Mathilde takes Anna in, teaches her the ovens, and involves her, carefully at first, in the deliveries. Anna gives birth to Trudy in 1940. The bakery becomes the center of the novel's moral universe and of its argument.

Mathilde is the closest thing the book has to a heroic figure, and Blum knows it. She is brave, organized, and willing to die for the work, and she does. When she is caught while transporting bread and weapons to prisoners, she goes to her death without naming anyone, including Anna and the baby. Her execution is reported in the same flat tone the book uses for everything else, which somehow makes it worse. I closed the book for an afternoon after that chapter.

The bakery chapters also contain the novel's best physical writing: the flour, the burn scars on Mathilde's forearms, the smell of the ovens, the ways a loaf of bread can be a weapon or a prayer depending on who is carrying it. Blum is very good on the texture of ordinary life under totalitarianism, on how people keep score in small ways because the big ways are suicidally expensive.

The officer in the photograph

Here is where the book becomes genuinely difficult, in the best sense. Anna carries bread to the camp on the hill outside Weimar, and one day she sees the Obersturmführer, the camp officer, kill a man with his bare hands for reaching for a piece of bread. He sees her see it. From that moment she is in his sights, and he begins to want her, in the possessive way of a man who has never been refused anything.

Anna refuses him as long as she can. But the equation is simple and brutal: she is the mother of a small child, she has no protector now that Mathilde is dead, and there are worse men than this one. So she becomes his mistress. He provides food, medicine, coal, small protections that keep Anna and Trudy alive through the last years of the war. The photograph at the center of the modern story was taken during this period, on some festive day when the officer wanted a picture of his little family.

I have read some criticism of this section, and I understand it. On the page, the arrangement can feel rushed relative to the enormous moral weight it is supposed to carry. But the novel's point is not that Anna made a good choice. The point is that the war had collapsed the distance between survival and collaboration until the line was in the mud, and Blum refuses to let a reader stand on clean ground and pass judgment. Anna survives, and Trudy survives, because Anna paid with the only currency she had.

This is the gray zone the whole book is built around, and it is the same territory later memoirs of the period would map more explicitly. Fifty years later, in Minnesota, Anna still will not explain the photograph, because explaining it would mean admitting that her daughter's life was bought with the officer's gifts, and that there is no answer to the question of whether it was worth it.

The American soldier, and Minnesota

The liberation chapters arrive at the end of the war: the American soldier Jack Schlemmer finds Anna and Trudy in the chaos, marries Anna, and brings them to a small town in Minnesota. For about five pages the book lets you believe in the rescue. Then it becomes a different, quieter kind of horror.

Jack is decent and also limited. He drinks. He cannot understand his wife. Anna, who survived by burying everything, buries everything here too, in a bakery she opens downtown, in the ovens and the payroll and the German lullabies she hums without noticing. The marriage withers in scenes you barely see, which is exactly right for this book. The most devastating line about the marriage comes late, when the novel notes that Jack was the one who put the nail in the coffin, over an argument about the officer that Anna could not explain away.

And so the modern chapters: Trudy at her university, launching what she calls the German Project, a set of interviews with elderly Germans about their wartime lives. On the surface it is scholarship. Underneath it is a woman digging in a graveyard hoping to find her own face. The interviews are the best original material in the book: veterans and farmers and housewives who tell Blum's protagonist sanitized stories in proud voices, who insist they knew nothing, who sometimes let a detail slip and then laugh as if they had told a joke. Trudy takes it all down, and you watch her slowly understand that a whole generation learned to live beside an unexamined past.

One of her interviewees, Rainer, becomes her lover. He is gentle where Trudy is spiky, and their relationship carries most of the present-day tenderness. He also has his own history and his own limits, and Blum does not let him function as a reward for Trudy's healing. There is a scene late in the book where the relationship strains under the weight of everything Trudy is hauling around, and it is handled with a patience I did not expect.

What the interviews finally turn up

The plot engine of the modern sections is a thin envelope of leads that eventually points to Felix Pfeffer, an elderly German businessman whose wartime years touched both Anna and Max. Trudy tracks him down, and his testimony opens the last door in the book.

I will not pretend the revelations are shocking in the way a thriller's are. By the time you get there, you have already guessed much of what Trudy learns: that Max never came out of Buchenwald, that the comfortable Weimar businessman and the bakery network and the Obersturmführer all touched the same small world, and that Trudy's father was the doctor, not the man in the wedding photograph. The book is not interested in the click of a puzzle piece. It is interested in the fact that Anna, given one last chance to tell her daughter the truth to her face, refuses. Pfeffer says what Anna cannot. And even then, the honest thing about this novel is that catching the truth secondhand does not heal anything. Trudy gets the facts and does not get her mother.

The last chapters are quiet and not consoling. Trudy drives Pfeffer home and stops at an overlook on the Mississippi River, and she is left, in the book's own words, in a vacuum between one part of her life ending and another waiting to take its place. She thinks about calling Rainer. That is the whole resolution. It is not very much by the standards of family drama, but it is the amount the war left in the account.

What the book gets right, and where it strains

I think this is a serious first novel with one genuinely important thing to say, and I understand the critics who wanted it to say that thing better. Kirkus called it ambitious but flawed, and the complaint was specific: Anna's long silence seems underexplained for its magnitude. The Independent liked the book and was irritated by what it called formulaic descriptions of Germans as a people. I felt both jabs land at different moments. There are places where the prose reaches for a moral and gets there too smoothly, and a few secondary characters who exist to deliver a theme and then leave.

But the ungainliness of the book is also part of its honesty. The material resists tidiness. Blum refuses to make Anna likable, refuses to make the officer a cartoon, refuses to give Trudy the closure that years of therapy and research are supposed to produce. The novel's twin engines, a mother who will not speak and a daughter who will not stop asking, produce friction on every page, and that friction is the point. Wartime survival was not a meritocracy of the good. People got through on luck, favors, passivity, and, occasionally, the unthinkable.

The book won the Harold U. Ribalow Prize in 2005 and became a New York Times bestseller, and it has stayed in print for two decades for a reason. It sits in a useful middle place between the memoir literature of the camps and the family-saga fiction about the war, and it asks a question that fewer books in either category ask out loud: what does a mother owe her child when the truth of how she kept that child alive is unbearable to both of them? Blum's answer is not comforting. The book leaves Anna in her kitchen and Trudy in her car and the reader holding the photograph. Some doors only open after the people behind them are gone.