This was more than a Holocaust book. It’s the story of a mother and
daughter. The sacrifices a mother makes for her child. Ones she can not
speak of long after the fact.
Anna is a young German woman with a
child during WWII. She lives in Weimar near the Buchenwald camp. The
things she goes through, the things her toddler daughter Trudie witness
as she tries to keep them alive. That is the story taking place with war
as its backdrop.
The story bounces back and forth between the
war and the mid 1990’s. Trudie is a grown woman, now Trudy, and she is a
professor of German Studies. Her mother still doesn’t talk about what
happened and Trudy has been haunted her entire life by dreams and vague
memories.
There is also shame and guilt and pain both women are suffering through but can’t talk about to each other.
That
sometimes we come to love those who save us is a hard thing to
understand but one that makes sense when you stop judging and think
about what the world was like for Anna.
And again, the heart of this story is mother/daughter relationships and how sometimes they are painful and difficult.
(read Jan 2012)
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