Author: Georgia Hunter
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
Published: February 14, 2017
Publisher: Penguin Books
View on Goodreads
Date Completed: January 30, 2025
My rating: 
Thoughts
Historical fiction is great and all, but when you add a real-life family story into the mix, the emotions can really come alive. This is a fictionalized account of a real family’s struggle for survival during the Holocaust.
The Kurc family were Polish Jews living in the wrong place at the wrong time. They thought they were safe as World War II broke out around them until their country was split in two with the Russians taking half and the Germans taking the other half.
One of the sons, Addy, who I believe is also the grandfather of the author, was in France when Poland was taken. But he and the other Jews in France knew they should get out as soon as possible. Cut off from his family and not able to make it back to Poland, he ended up traveling to Brazil and living out the war in Rio.
Others in the family had to learn to present themselves as Catholics. They had to renounce their home country (Poland was no longer seen as a sovereign nation – it was a territory of either the Soviets or the Germans). And they had to watch their possessions taken, their friends hauled away. They had to board trains, not knowing their destination or if they would live to see their family again. They had to ride in those trains with others dying around them.
Through it all, the family had one united goal: to survive. All of them, in whatever part of the world they were in at the time, were always thinking of the family and how they could get back together again.
The title should be somewhat of a spoiler on how this turns out for them.
This really was a beautifully told story. I appreciated the various stories (each chapter was almost its own short story) of the various family members. And I really liked the timeline interjections with some historical information to place the book in history.
As much as I hate to say it about a book like this, I found that parts of the story dragged on. It was wonderfully written, but every once in a while I found my mind drifting. And it was difficult to pull myself back.
Overall, I gave this one 4 out of 5 stars. With all of the stories of loss and death during the Holocaust, it is nice to get one that is a story of hope and love. That’s not to say other families were lacking that hope and love. But that was the main focal point of this book. With all the horrible things going on around them, this family struggled to survive not for the sake of survival, but for the family.
