Those Who Save Us

About five years ago I mentored a 10 year old boy. We spent nearly every Saturday together for two years and had to come up with a lot of creative ways to spend our time in Boston. More than once we went ice skating on the Frog Pond and spent many mornings rollerblading along the Esplanade. We trekked parts of the Freedom Trail with stops along the way for treats (Mike's Pastry and Faneuil Hall). Anyone who has spent time with kids aged 7-12 knows this: endless questions and arguments that are oddly more logical than should be fair.

J: Will you buy me those Pokeman Cards?

Me: No, sorry!

J: Why not?

Me: Because...

J: But I know you have money and they are only $2.

Or...

Me: I'm going slow rollerblading because I don't know how to stop.

J: But what if you were coming to the end of the dock and the river was in front of you?

Me: I'd fall to the side first.

J: What if you were rollerblading down a mountain and a bear was chasing after you?

Me: What??

Or...

(At the Holocaust Memorial in Boston by Faneuil Hall)

J: Why? I don't understand?

Me: Me neither.

So it really wasn't a surprise that Steph's pick for book club this month, Those Who Save Us, by Jenna Blum, raised a lot of questions and generated more discussion than most books we read.

Anna and Trudie are a mother and daughter of German descent currently living in Minnesota. Trudie doesn't know much about her early childhood during WWII in Weimar and Anna refuses to talk about it. But Trudie harbors guilt that her father was a high ranking SS official based on a small photo in a cigarette case her mom has held onto. Because her own mother won't discuss what she did to survive during the war, Trudie starts interviewing other Germans living in Minnesota, capturing their stories on video.

In the meantime, the story flashes back to Anna's life during the war, and we realize that everyone's decisions on everything were colored by fear and the desire to just survive.

In a speech today, President Obama recognized survivors of the Holocaust and remarked, "We are awed by your acts of courage and conscience. And your presence today compels each of us to ask ourselves whether we would have done what you did. We can only hope that the answer is yes," he said.

Ms. Blum's book asks the same questions and comes up with some difficult answers.

5/5 netflix stars