A Brilliant Life

October 1, 2023
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. Krak�w-Plasz�w, 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.

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October 30, 2023
Australian journalist Unreich recounts the life story of her mother Mira Unreich (1927–2017) in this searing debut history. Mira’s childhood in Czechoslovakia was happy, but around the time Germany annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, she began to experience antisemitism from her neighbors. In 1941, the occupying Germans forced Jews to wear identifying items on their clothing. By 1942, most of the Jewish families in their small town had been deported. Mira’s father, Dolfie Blumenstock, risked his life to get forged identity papers to hundreds of Jews and gave shelter to members of the resistance. When the Nazis came to arrest him, Blumenstock was shot while trying to escape, and Mira and her mother Genya ended up in the Plaszow death camp, where Genya soon perished. Mira managed to survive Plasvow, as well as Auschwitz. After the war, she eventually settled in Australia, where, Unreich emphasizes, she built meaningful and loving relationships. Some portions of the narrative hit a false note, as when Unreich declares that the “concept of good luck seems woven into the fabric of the Jewish people.” Still, Unreich does her mother’s experiences justice, making clear that the Nazi genocide could not crush Mira’s desire and wherewithal to lead a happy life. The result is an uplifiting, if at times overly rosy, account.

September 19, 2023
A Holocaust story is never an easy read, but A Brilliant Life has such a harrowing prologue that it throws the reader right into the thick of it, so be prepared. Stories of ageing and dying parents can be tearful at times, too, but there’s hope and beauty in this ‘brilliant’ biography. Journalist Rachelle Unreich has vividly captured her mother Mira’s bright spirit, both through her accounts of Mira's earlier life and through the modern-day first-person moments interspersed throughout the book. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1927, Mira was 17 when she was taken to the first of four concentration camps, surviving each one thanks to people who, in her words, ‘helped me without getting benefit from it themselves’. Unflinching information is included about Mira’s experiences in Plaszow, Birkenau, Auschwitz, and on the arduous death march to Ravensbrück in Germany, when even her inimitable spirit seems about to break. Well researched but never dry, the book shines when describing Mira’s family and her capacity to see light through horrific darkness and notice the moments of serendipity. After a long and captivating life, Mira is living with terminal cancer in her home in Melbourne in 2016, and her daughter interviews her while she still has time. We are brought into the family fold and invited to join them in Mira’s final days, enjoying the richness of the storytelling the way we might at a Shabbat meal.