We Were the Lucky Ones

One Family, Seven Journeys

In the spring of 1939, the Kurc family gathers in Radom, Poland for Passover — twelve adults across three generations, celebrating the holiday with no idea what the next six years will bring. By summer, Germany invades Poland. Over the next six years, the Kurc family members scatter: to Siberian labor camps, to the French Foreign Legion, to Brazil, to Italy, to Palestine. Each takes a different path through the war. Georgia Hunter’s novel follows each of them.

The Truth Behind the Fiction

Hunter spent a decade researching her family’s story before writing a word of fiction. The result is a narrative supported by an extraordinary evidentiary foundation — letters, documents, interviews with surviving family members, archival research across multiple countries. When she labels something a novel rather than nonfiction, she is being precise about the scenes she had to imagine, the dialogue she had to reconstruct. But the events are real. The people are real. The survival is real.

Structure as Suspense

The novel’s power comes partly from its structure. We follow each family member in alternating chapters, knowing the approximate historical timeline but not which individuals will survive. Hunter maintains tension over 400 pages without artificial contrivance — the history itself is suspenseful enough. A character’s deportation to Siberia, which might end the story, becomes instead the beginning of a survival narrative that takes them through Iran and Italy. The accumulation of close escapes, lucky encounters, and narrow survivals earns the book’s title.

The Lucky Ones

“We Were the Lucky Ones” does not flinch from the fact that luck was what saved this family — luck, and the privilege of scattered geography at a particular moment. Most Polish Jewish families were not lucky. Hunter keeps this knowledge present throughout the celebration of her family’s survival, ensuring the novel never becomes simply triumphant. The final reunion scene, when scattered family members find each other after years of uncertainty, is one of the most emotionally overwhelming passages in recent WWII fiction.

History as Suspense, Continued

What makes the structure so effective is that Hunter never has to manufacture tension; the historical record supplies it. Because the reader follows the family along the real timeline of the war — the 1939 invasion, the sealing of the ghettos, the deportations, the slow turning of the tide — but does not know which of these specific, beloved individuals will live to see the end, every chapter carries an undertow of dread. A knock at the door, a checkpoint, a forged document examined a beat too long: in this world, the smallest moments are matters of life and death, and Hunter lets them land with full weight. The accumulation of near-misses and impossible escapes is what finally earns the title, and it is why the book reads with the propulsion of a thriller despite its weighty subject.

A Granddaughter’s Discovery

The story behind the book is nearly as remarkable as the book itself. Georgia Hunter grew up with no idea that she came from Holocaust survivors; her grandfather Addy, who had rebuilt his life in America, never spoke of his Jewish childhood in Poland or what the family endured. Hunter first glimpsed the truth as a teenager, interviewing her grandmother for a high-school English project, and years later, at a family reunion, she began hearing astonishing fragments — a baby born in a Siberian labor camp, a desperate hike over the Alps, escapes across continents. That seed grew into nearly a decade of obsessive research: tracking down surviving relatives, combing archives in multiple countries, and traveling the routes her family had fled along. The novel is, in effect, an act of reclamation — a granddaughter recovering and preserving a history that had nearly been lost to silence.

The Scattered Kurcs

The drama lives in the specificity of each family member’s path. There is Addy, the charming composer stranded in Paris and then routed, improbably, to Brazil; Genek and his wife Herta, exiled to the frozen brutality of Siberia, where Herta gives birth in unimaginable conditions; Mila, shielding her young daughter Felicia through ghetto and hiding; the fearless, sharp-tongued Halina, who repeatedly risks everything to keep the family connected; and the others scattered toward Italy, Palestine, and the Polish front. By cutting between these threads, Hunter builds a mosaic of the entire wartime Jewish experience — the ghettos, the camps, the forged papers, the partisan fighting, the desperate emigrations — refracted through people the reader comes to love. Each storyline could stand alone; together they form an epic.

From Page to Screen

The novel’s reach widened enormously in 2024 with a Hulu limited series adaptation, starring Joey King as Halina and Logan Lerman as Addy, which brought the Kurc family’s story to a vast new audience and earned praise for honoring the emotional truth of the source. Hunter, who was closely involved, spoke movingly about the responsibility of entrusting her real family’s Holocaust experience to Hollywood. The adaptation underscored what made the book resonate in the first place: this is not an abstract history but the intimate, particular survival of one ordinary family, which is precisely what makes the larger catastrophe comprehensible.

Verdict

We Were the Lucky Ones is among the most moving and meticulously researched works of Holocaust fiction in recent memory, and its power is inseparable from its truth — these were real people, and they really survived against staggering odds. Hunter’s achievement is to hold two things at once: the soaring, almost unbearable joy of a family’s reunion, and the sober awareness that their luck was the cruel exception. In an age of resurgent antisemitism, the book reads as both a memorial and a warning about what happens when people stop seeing one another as human. The large cast takes patience to sort out early on, but readers who stay with it are rewarded with one of the great survival stories of the century — a book that turns the abstraction of six million into the beating heart of one family you will not forget.

Our rating: 4.6/5 — One of the most remarkable true-life WWII survival stories ever written, researched with extraordinary care and told with profound emotional intelligence.

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