We Were the Lucky Ones
One Polish-Jewish family scattered across continents by the war — based on the author's own family, all of whom survived.
The Verdict
The premise sounds like a novelist's invention, except that it happened: an entire Polish-Jewish family, scattered by the war across continents and camps and armies, survived — every one of them. Georgia Hunter reconstructed her own family's story and turned it into a novel that follows the Kurc siblings and their parents through occupation, deportation, flight, and improbable reunion. Against a death toll that consumed almost everyone like them, their survival is a statistical near-impossibility, and the book carries the weight of that knowledge on every page.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you want
- One family's near-impossible survival
- The Holocaust across many fronts and continents
- Fiction grounded in the author's own family
- An accessible, emotional epic
Look elsewhere if you want
- A documentary history
- The camps in unflinching detail
- Spare or experimental fiction
Why We Rated It 4.3
Historical Context
We Were the Lucky Ones (2017) follows the Kurc family, Polish Jews scattered by the war, based on the real history of author Georgia Hunter's own family, who improbably all survived. It was adapted into a television series in 2024.
Events Covered
Read It Alongside
Where to Buy
ISBN: 978-0399563096
Read This Against
The same events seen from a different vantage point. The fullest understanding often lives in the space between accounts that don't agree.
Other Books About the Same Events
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is We Were the Lucky Ones a true story?
- It is a novel based closely on the real survival of the author's own family during the Holocaust.
- Did the whole family really survive?
- Yes — the near-impossibility of an entire Jewish family surviving is the heart of the book and its title.