RACHELLE UNREICH A Brilliant Life. Reviewed by Sandra Hogan

Rachelle Unreich tells her mother’s extraordinary story of surviving the horror of the Holocaust to go on and live ‘a brilliant life’.

When the world is confusing, hostile, disturbing, books that tell stories of people who survive great adversity and go on to find meaning and joy in life – such as AB Facey’s A Fortunate Life, Sally Morgan’s My Place, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning – can provide inspiration.

A Brilliant Life by Melbourne journalist and author, Rachelle Unreich is one such. Written during the COVID lockdown, it has been shortlisted for several awards and seems likely to become a classic.

Sub-titled My mother’s inspiring story of surviving the Holocaust, it is the story of Mira, who survived four Nazi concentration camps. Rachelle interviewed her mother over six months in 2016 when Mira was 89 and dying of cancer. She writes that it was

my last chance to learn some of the details of her life, which has known both beauty and brutality. But more importantly, it is an opportunity to discover the origins of her deep belief. I am curious about the unwavering steadiness of her faith … [Her] experience of the universe is one where the inexplicable happens, and where the thread of magic skips across the edges of the darkest fabric.

Four years later, after a paralysing period of grief after Mira’s death, Rachelle wrote the first draft of A Brilliant Life in six weeks.

Because her mother was willing to remember and speak about her life, Unreich is able to build an unusually detailed and vivid picture of her mother’s childhood, growing up in a loving family in a village in Slovakia, close to the Polish border. She describes the Jewish community, with its synagogue and cemetery and bathhouse, and the traditional roles, such as kosher slaughterer and matchmaker. It was a simple life, without running water or electricity, but the children read books and played marbles, sang songs and celebrated Shabbat with candles and sweet challah bread.

Mira grew up steeped in Jewish religion and tradition, but she also had non-Jewish friends. She had no experience of antisemitism until she was 11, in 1938, when a school friend announced that her father didn’t like or trust Jews.

By then Mira and her family had learned about Hitler invading Austria and stories of Jewish persecution, but they didn’t believe it.

It sounded like propaganda. We thought: we live in the twentieth century. And we knew the Germans to be very correct, to do things that were incredible … What we didn’t know was that they would do something that was so incredible – something that so defied credibility – that people still don’t believe it to this day.

By 1940, under Nazi rule, their lives had changed completely. Jewish children were forbidden to go to school and the government had seized Jewish land and property. This was when Mira’s father Dolfie Blumenstock began to show his calibre. Using his networks in the town, he made a deal with a Christian man that he would take over the name of the business, while Dolfie remained a silent partner. It was a good deal for both and the new owner of the store never took advantage of the situation to take more than they had agreed.

Dolfie was a realist. Many Jewish people refused to believe the stories that leaked out about concentration camps; they got on trains to the camps, believing the story they were told that they were going to labour camps, where they would be safe. Dolfie made a point of finding escaped prisoners and listening closely to their stories. He heard the evidence and acted on it – preventing most of his family from being deported until August 1944. He had a detailed escape plan in place but, on the night before their departure, the SS burst through their door. Dolfie was shot and killed and the family captured and sent to the camps.

Mira barely survived her time in the concentration camps. If she had been sent earlier, she and her brothers would almost certainly have died. For this, she knew she could thank her father.

Unreich takes readers through Mira’s experience of the camps, to her escape, and her life after the war: a young woman still, who loved deeply, married twice, travelled widely, learned several languages and found inexpensive ways to dress in the highest European fashion. We see her, finally, settled in Australia, much loved, amidst her children and grandchildren.

Unreich is driven by the need to know how and why her mother survived. Mira attributed her survival to the people who had helped her without getting any benefit for themselves. One of the satisfactions of reading this account is the number of those selfless acts that preserved her life and her belief in humanity. These acts of kindness ranged from the gift of a potato, to a guard who pulled her off a truck taking prisoners to be shot and pushed into a pit. The kind people were Jews, Christians and non-believers.

Unreich explains that Jewish people understand that life incorporates the bitter and the sweet as side-by-side companions.

I did not know anyone whose life incorporated these two pillars to the extent that my mother’s did. But she did not let bitterness overwhelm her life. She had seen the worst of humanity, yet she chose to concentrate on the best of it. She had seen life expunged as if it were meaningless, yet she chose to invest her own life with purpose. She had been close to death, yet she had decided to live.

My Brilliant Life is a dramatic escape story, and an evocative account of prewar Jewish life, and of postwar Jewish life in Australia. What makes it a book to keep and hold close is the example it offers of how to live a good life, even a brilliant life, in the face of hardship, horror and uncertainty.

Rachelle Unreich A Brilliant Life: My mother’s inspiring story of surviving the Holocaust Hachette Australia 2023 280pp $34.99

Sandra Hogan is the author of bestselling non-fiction spy story With My Little Eye. Her memoir My Mother’s Secret will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2027.

You can buy A Brilliant Life from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

Tags: immigration, Jewish lives, postwar Australia, Rachelle | Unreich, Slovakia, survival, the Holocaust, World War II