These are all familiar elements of Holocaust stories, but the most important moment of Hunter’s novel comes as Addy’s ship, en route to America, stalls in Casablanca, Morocco. Some Kurcs survived by obtaining false papers and masquerading as Christians others hid in barns or convents. We Were the Lucky Ones follows the Kurc family from upper middle-class comfort in Warsaw and Radom to various shtetls, each of which is eventually liquidated, to Siberian labor camps, to Tel Aviv, and to the Italian war front at Monte Cassino. The emotional trauma he faced as he traveled a circuitous route from France to Dakar and finally to Brazil pales in comparison to the ordeals of his parents and siblings in Poland, Lvov, and Siberia, but he is eventually able to use his position to bring them to the New World. A pianist and composer who studied in Paris, he was able to leave Europe for Brazil at beginning of the war.

The entry point for the story is Hunter’s grandfather Eddy Courts, née Addy Kurc. The shifting point of view is elegantly executed and always clear, and Hunter evokes pre-war Poland with loving detail, clearly showing what was left behind and lost. We Were the Lucky Ones is structured like a concerto grosso, interweaving the stories of Hunter’s great-grandparents, grandfather, great-aunts and -uncles, and second cousins. When their children were school-age, Sol and Nechuma sent them to elite private academies.Sol and Nechuma hoped to give their children a chance to side-step the undertones of anti-Semitism that had defined Jewish life in Radom since before any of them could remember.” “.Rather than live in the Old Quarter as the majority of Radom’s less affluent Jews do, they own a stately apartment in the center of town.Their fabric shop is thriving Nechuma takes great care on her buying trips to collect the highest quality textiles, and their clients, both Polish and Jewish, come from as far as Kraków to purchase their ladieswear and silk. She vividly describes her great-grandmother, Nechuma, and her family’s way of life, as they gathered around the Passover seder table: After extensive interviews and research, Hunter created a novelization of their stories. Some fled, some hid, some fought, but all were reunited in the Americas after seven years of separation and uncertainty. In the expansive Holocaust narrative genre, these qualities are ever-present – but rarely in such stories does every protagonist survive, as they do in Georgia Hunter’s fictionalized family history, We Were the Lucky Ones (Viking 2017).Īs a teenager, Hunter learned that her mother’s family had survived the German occupation of Poland. Desperate times inspire bravery, creativity, resilience, and endurance.

We were the lucky ones hunter