Author Georgia Hunter did not know about her family history, not even that she was one quarter Jewish and that her extended family members, including her beloved grandfather, were survivors of the Holocaust. But at a long-delayed family reunion, Ms. Hunter learned the truth and heard some of the stories, stories that her grandfather before his death had never shared. She later began a decade long research project in which the traveled all over the world to ask questions and learn as much as she could about her family’s history and survival in World War II Poland.

All of that history and those many stories became the nucleus of this fascinating novel, We Were the Lucky Ones. The title comes from an observation made by Georgia’s mother’s cousin, Felicia: “Our family, we shouldn’t have survived. Not so many of us, at least. It’s a miracle in many ways. We were the lucky ones.”

Of course, not everyone in the book does survive, but the stories that this book tells are something of a miracle. Not many Polish Jews did survive. Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow, and even the tiny little Radom where the story of the Kurc family begins, were all destroyed by the war, and their Jewish populations were not just decimated, but rather practically annihilated.The story of how some of those Polish Jews survived is amazing, and yes, miraculous.

It makes me wonder why, a question I realize can never be answered. Still, why this family and not so many others? Were they more resourceful and quick-witted than others, or were they just lucky? Did God preserve them for a reason? I have no idea. But I certainly believe that God was there in the Holocaust, in the living and in the dying and in the suffering and the deliverance, that in His mercy He allowed some to die and some to live to tell the story.

I highly recommend this book for adult readers. What does reading about such evil and suffering do for a person? It should make us more compassionate and more prepared to recognize and fight against the evil that is still present in our own world.