A Brilliant Life

At eighty-eight, living in Australia and newly diagnosed with cancer, Mira agrees to be interviewed by her daughter, a journalist hoping to distract her from illness. What emerges is the story of a girl from Czechoslovakia, caught by the Nazis at seventeen, who survived four concentration camps including Auschwitz, and a death march when she was too weak to walk. Remarkably, Mira remembers it all through the people who were kind to her, and Rachelle Unreich comes to see how that way of looking shielded her mother from the worst of what she endured.

Woven through is the daughter's own story as the child of a survivor, the strength the two women share and the odd coincidences that seem to follow them. A tender, clear-eyed memoir of a mother and daughter, for anyone who values testimony told with love.