{"id":30820,"date":"2017-05-08T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2017-05-08T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=30820"},"modified":"2017-05-02T14:57:00","modified_gmt":"2017-05-02T19:57:00","slug":"we-were-the-lucky-ones-by-georgia-hunter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/we-were-the-lucky-ones-by-georgia-hunter\/","title":{"rendered":"We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/strong><\/em><\/a>We Were the Lucky Ones<\/strong><\/em><\/a> by Georgia Hunter is the story of the Kurc family and their experiences\u00a0 during World War II. This novel is actually the story of her family, and she uses the real names of her grandparents, mother, aunts, uncles and cousins.<\/p>\n

I was struck by the similarity of phrase, when reading an account in the April 24th\u00a0issue of The Dispatch\u00a0 and The Rock Island Argus <\/em>\u00a0of a speech by Doris Fogel.\u00a0\u00a0During Holocaust Remembrance week, \u00a0Ms. Fogel, a Chicago resident who spent years in a Shanghai ghetto during World War II, said: “No one could have foretold the horror and hardship the coming years would bring to millions of Jews and others,”\u00a0… “Every day, I realized I was one of the lucky ones.”<\/p>\n

The Kurcs are from a small town in Poland, and as the war goes on they see their lives and homes disintegrate. Some are forced to live in ghettos and\u00a0 concentration camps, some are sent to a\u00a0Siberian gulag. The “luckiest”\u00a0\u00a0is Addy who is living\u00a0in Paris when the war starts, and he cannot\u00a0get back home to Poland, and he can’t let them know where he is. Finally, he\u00a0gets a visa to Brazil. After the war, the Red Cross is able to connect those who survive and the extended family emigrates to Brazil,\u00a0where Addy can help them\u00a0rebuild.\u00a0They’ve lost their homes, identities,\u00a0friends, belongings, savings, and occupations, but in the end they still have their family and faith.<\/p>\n

Survivors were left in limbo after the war. Hunter describes in realistic detail the rules, regulations and laws involved in getting visas, and the rigors and dangers\u00a0of travel – both during and after the war. I was unfamiliar with the level of atrocity in Poland and how, even after the war, Jews were still\u00a0 persecuted in Germany.<\/p>\n

Hunter personalizes the horror of what so many suffered. It’s hard to comprehend the scope of what happened and how many millions of stories there are that have been lost. The reader gets a small sense of this by following the members of the Kurc family\u00a0as they, incrementally, have everything taken from them. Another tragedy is losing so many stories\u00a0– as the last several generations pass away, along with their first-person accounts.<\/p>\n

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We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter is the story of the Kurc family and their experiences\u00a0 during World War II. This novel is actually the story of her family, and she uses the real names of her grandparents, mother, aunts, uncles and cousins. I was struck by the[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1,8],"tags":[155,697,102],"class_list":["post-30820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reference","category-staff-picks","tag-family","tag-holocaust","tag-world-war-ii"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-816","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30820"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30867,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30820\/revisions\/30867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}