Editors Reads Verdict
One of the most extraordinary WWII survival stories ever told — and the more extraordinary for being true. Hunter spent ten years researching her family's story, and the resulting novel is a masterpiece of witness and reconstruction.
What We Loved
- Based on the author's real family — the weight of truth is palpable
- The multi-continent structure creates remarkable dramatic tension
- Each family member's story is complete and individual
- The ending has an emotional power few novels can match
Minor Drawbacks
- The large cast can be difficult to track in the early chapters
- Some chapters are necessarily more detailed than others
- The compressed timeframe means some experiences are sketched rather than explored
Key Takeaways
- → Luck is a genuine factor in survival — not just courage and resourcefulness
- → Family bonds can sustain people across enormous distances and deprivations
- → The Holocaust scattered Jewish families across the entire globe
- → Hope maintained in the darkest conditions is itself a form of resistance
- → The stories of ordinary families contain the history of the century
| Author | Georgia Hunter |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Viking |
| Pages | 400 |
| Published | February 14, 2017 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Historical Fiction, WWII |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | WWII fiction readers; anyone interested in the Holocaust; multigenerational family saga lovers. |
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.
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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