A BRILLIANT LIFE

Journalist Unreich makes a graceful book debut with a family history, gleaned from interviews that she conducted with her 89-year-old mother, Mira, before she died from cancer.

Born in a Czech village in 1927, Mira was the youngest of five children of Dolfie and Genya Blumenstock, Jewish shopkeepers. Her peaceful childhood ended in September 1940, when she was 13. Jews were banned from owning businesses or attending school, and their private property was confiscated by Czechoslovakian officials. In 1942, the round-ups began. Vowing to keep his family safe, Dolfie strategized their escape. Mira, like her siblings, had non-Jewish papers, but for her safety was sent away from the family to another town, where she rented a room and worked. At the same time as Dolfie protected his own family, he and his son smuggled Jews out of the Bochnia and Warsaw Ghettos, with the help of non-Jewish drivers. They hid the fugitives in homes, including Dolfie’s own, before sending them on to Budapest. But in 1944, the family met the fate of so many other Jews: Mira witnessed as Dolfie was murdered outside of his house; she and her mother were sent to a camp, one of over 40,000 situated all over Eastern Europe. Kraków-Płaszów, where Mira was sent first, was located in the south of Poland. “Originally a forced labour camp,” Unreich writes, “it had become an effective killing location.” By the time the war ended, Mira had spent nearly eight months in four camps; her mother and a brother had been killed. Mira’s recollections of the cruelty and sadism of the Holocaust are wrenching, yet the experiences did not quash her abiding faith in humanity. As a wife, mother, neighbor, and friend, she both embraced and enacted goodness.

A daughter’s tender portrait of a woman who lived through terror.