Where to Start with Georgia Hunter: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Georgia Hunter — how to approach We Were the Lucky Ones, her true-story novel about a Polish Jewish family scattered across four continents during the Second World War. A complete reading guide.
Georgia Hunter is an American writer and advertising creative director. We Were the Lucky Ones (2017) was published by Viking after Hunter spent a decade researching the true wartime history of her own family — a Polish Jewish family whose scattered survival across four continents represented one of the more extraordinary stories she had found in the archives. The book became a bestseller and a Hulu limited series.
Where to Start: We Were the Lucky Ones (2017)
The essential Georgia Hunter — and one of the most remarkable WWII survival stories ever published, made more remarkable by being true. We Were the Lucky Ones was ten years in the making: Hunter spent that time in archives across Europe, Brazil, and the United States, tracking down surviving family members, reading letters and diaries, and assembling the documentary foundation for a narrative that had until then existed only in fragments of family memory.
The story begins in 1939, at a Passover gathering of the Kurc family in Radom, Poland. Twelve adults across three generations are present. No one knows what is coming. Germany invades Poland that summer, and over the next six years, the Kurc family members scatter in every direction.
Nechuma and Sol, the Kurc parents, remain in Poland as conditions deteriorate. Their story — the choices available to elderly Jewish Poles as the German occupation tightened — represents one of the book’s most harrowing and most historically specific threads.
Mila and her husband Feliks flee eastward, into Soviet-controlled territory, and are eventually deported to Siberia. Their survival in the labour camps, and the extraordinary journey that follows through Iran and eventually Italy, traces a path that few Western readers have encountered in WWII fiction.
Nechuma’s son Genek is also deported to Siberia, and his parallel story — separated from his wife and child for years, unable to know if they survive — is among the novel’s most emotionally demanding threads.
Jakob is conscripted and eventually winds up fighting with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. Halina, Nechuma’s youngest daughter, stays in Radom longer than the others and must survive through concealment and false papers — the most dangerous of the family’s paths through occupied Poland.
Addy, the eldest Kurc son, had emigrated to Brazil before the war began. His story is structurally different from his siblings’: he is safe, working as a musician in São Paulo, but unable to reach his family or know whether they survive. His anguish of uncertainty — the suffering of the geographically safe — is its own form of wartime experience.
Hunter follows all of these stories simultaneously, cutting between them with increasing urgency as the war’s final years bring some threads toward reunion and others toward unresolvable tension. The novel’s structure — seven paths through the same catastrophe — creates a dramatic architecture that sustains suspense across 400 pages without artificial manipulation.
The title is honest. Hunter does not pretend her family was saved by virtue or heroism alone. Luck was a genuine factor — in encountering a particular official, in choosing a particular direction to flee, in the timing of a particular deportation. Most Polish Jewish families were not lucky. Hunter keeps this knowledge present throughout the celebration of her family’s survival, ensuring the novel never becomes simply triumphant.
The final reunion scene, after years of uncertainty and separation, is one of the most emotionally overwhelming passages in recent WWII fiction — and it lands with the weight of something that actually happened.
Reading Georgia Hunter
We Were the Lucky Ones is Hunter’s essential and only novel. It stands alone and requires no prior reading.
For the full Georgia Hunter bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Georgia Hunter author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Georgia Hunter?
We Were the Lucky Ones (2017) is Hunter's essential and only novel — a WWII survival story based on the true history of her own family. A Polish Jewish family scatters across four continents during the war, each member pursuing survival along a different path. Hunter spent ten years researching the story before writing. One of the most remarkable true-life WWII survival narratives ever told.
What is We Were the Lucky Ones about?
We Were the Lucky Ones follows the Kurc family — twelve adults across three generations in Radom, Poland — from their 1939 Passover gathering through six years of war in which the family members scatter to Siberian labour camps, Brazil, Italy, Palestine, and France. Each takes a completely different path through the war, and Hunter follows all of them. The novel is based on a true story; the author's own family is the Kurc family.
Is We Were the Lucky Ones fiction or non-fiction?
We Were the Lucky Ones is classified as historical fiction because Hunter had to imagine dialogue and certain scenes for which no documentation exists. But the events are real, the people are real, and the survival is real. Hunter spent ten years in archives, conducting interviews with surviving family members across multiple continents before she wrote the novel. The research foundation is extensive enough that the book reads as much as witness testimony as invented narrative.
What should I read after We Were the Lucky Ones?
After We Were the Lucky Ones, Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key covers the Vel d'Hiv roundup in Paris with comparable emotional precision. Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale covers French Resistance and Jewish survival with similar family focus. Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See covers WWII through German and French perspectives with greater literary ambition and comparable emotional force.
