



While the novel’s title discloses the family’s survival, death is all around: in the Nazis’ indiscriminate violence toward Jews, from the SS mobile killing squads, and in the sharp hunger and squalid conditions that are constant and unyielding throughout.Īs author Georgia Hunter explains at the end, she based this book on her own family’s experiences. Together and separately the many family members - grandmother and grandfather, numerous adult children and their partners, and grandchildren - encounter a wide range of circumstances, including living in the ghetto being forced to work in Nazi Germany’s factories and farms serving in the resistance going into hiding in private homes, a Catholic school, and in plain sight with false identification serving in various countries’ militaries being abused in prison struggling against the cold in Siberia and emigrating from Europe both during and after the fighting. The novel starts before Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and concludes a few years after World War II ends. We Were the Lucky Ones chronicles the experiences of a large extended family during the Holocaust. We Were the Lucky Ones: A Novel by Georgia Hunter | Jewish Book Council
