​Save me Twice: Based on a True Story by E.A. Dustin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In essence this book is not a novel … it is a non-fiction book based on horrific and extraordinary real life events in Germany under Hitler and the third Reich, and of how brainwashed, and how inured to the horror of slaughter and death many ordinary people in Germany became and how, almost on the turn of a coin, one person will live and another will die, or be sent to concentration camp, or will escape.

The facts are in themselves fascinating. However, because the author adds some ‘twists’ and says in the epilogue that only 95% of the book is ‘factual’ it is called ‘a novel’ but it really isn’t a work of fiction – neither is it purely fact and therein lies the problem.

It doesn’t work as a novel because it isn’t written as a novel - there are too many bald facts and not enough atmosphere or emotional or imaginative input and it doesn’t completely work as a piece of non-fiction either because I was constantly wondering which bits were true and which were imagined, or exaggerated, or just ‘embroidered’ somehow.

The subject matter is fascinating but I found the writing style rather clunky which got in the way of my connection with the story. It was a little like reading a newspaper article with added dialogue. I got no real sense of the drama, of the era, of the time and place, of the weariness and fear or of the oppressive and desperate atmosphere that must have been pervasive. Perhaps because the author has so much invested in telling her family story truthfully, she held back her emotional response and this apparent lack of empathy or involvement in the character’s emotions prevented me from feeling for them or really caring about what happened to them. They never really came to life. but were kind of ‘once removed’.

I absolutely understand why the author is wedded to the truth of the story, it is an intensely personal one telling as it does the life story of her family whom she obviously loves and cherishes. I found it interesting in a cerebral sense in that I gained knowledge about lots of things I hadn’t known before, but it didn’t engage me. I can see it being of real interest to a reader looking for a serious historical document about Germany in WWII but it didn’t really work for this reader who was expecting an historical novel, albeit one with a basis in fact.

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