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.

Combining a passionate, doomed love story, a vivid evocation of life during the war, and a poignant mother/daughter drama, Those Who Save Us is a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame.

JENNA BLUM is of German descent and half Jewish. She worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years, interviewing Holocaust survivors. She lives in Boston,teaches at Boston University,and is the fiction editor for AGNI

magazine.

ALT VERSION: Jenna Blum has been writing professionally since 1986 when she won first prize in Seventeen Magazine's National Fiction Contest. Her work has been published in numerous literary and commercial magazines. The daughter of a Jewish newsman and a German concert pianist,she has always been fascinated by her heritage and the second world war. She worked for Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation for four years, interviewing survivors. She currently teaches at Boston University and is the Fiction Editor for AGNI magazine.