My family’s narrative took shape, at first, in the form of a timeline, which I peppered with historical details and color-coded by relative to help keep track of who was where/when. From there I flew to Rio de Janeiro and across the States, meeting with cousins and friends-anyone with a story to share. It began in 2008 when I set off with a digital voice recorder to interview a relative in Paris. Georgia Hunter: Thank you for having me! The project of unearthing and writing my family’s Holocaust past has been a nine-year labor of love. Can you describe the process of your research for We Were the Lucky Ones? The finely drawn characters pull us into the book and personalize the grotesque and harrowing story of what happened to the Jews of Poland.Įlise Schiller: Thank you for joining us. Because all of the family members take different paths to safety and freedom, We Were the Lucky Ones incorporates many historical events through their struggles, with beautifully detailed settings and action-packed scenes. She decided to present her work as a novel. Hunter spent nine years researching and recording her family’s story and the related history. Five years later, she learned more at a family reunion, and the spark of this novel ignited. This is when she discovered that her grandfather was a Holocaust survivor.

Hunter was assigned a school project on family history, and interviewed her grandmother. To her, he was a successful businessman, and a musician and composer. She was close to her grandfather, who had renamed himself Eddy Courts (from Addy Kurc) when he arrived in the States.

Georgia Hunter was unaware of this family history during her American childhood. Struggling to survive, the family is torn apart as each member responds as they must, fleeing, or hiding, or disguising themselves as non-Jews. But in 1939, as Nazi Germany is rising and the five children have begun their own families and careers, Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, and a short time later, by the Soviets from the east. Observant but not Orthodox Jews, they blended in with other upper-middle-class families, both Jewish and Polish, sending the children to private schools where most students were Catholic. Their world was filled with music, art, and love of family. Before World War II, her great-grandparents, Nechuma and Sol, owned a thriving business and with their five children, lived a comfortable life in Radom, Poland. Georgia Hunter has written an epic novel, We Were the Lucky Ones, based on a true family story.

Book review we were the lucky ones