Published: 7 November 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
When RACHELLE UNREICH sat down to write her mother’s story, she wanted it to capture the joy and life-affirming insights as well as the heartbreak.
Melbourne journalist Rachelle Unreich had long known she would, one day, write the story of how her mother Mira survived the Holocaust. And yet, for two years she struggled to find her way in as she tried to write a plan for the project. Unreich toyed with the idea of turning it into a podcast or even a series of short stories.
But it was only when she scrapped the plan during the pandemic that the words flowed freely. Unreich then wrote for six weeks straight with barely a break.
“It felt like the hand of my mother was beneath me and helping me write because I've never written like that in my life,” she says. “I've never written with such focus.”
The result is Unreich’s new book, A Brilliant Life. It charts Mira’s remarkable life, beginning with her joyous childhood in a Czechoslovakian village before going into hiding from the Nazis. Mira survived four concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and a death march.
Mira was emaciated and on the verge of death when she was liberated from Neustadt-Glewe, a sub-camp of Ravensbrück, at the age of 18. After the war Mira lived in France before finally settling in Australia.
In her writing, Unreich does not shield the reader from the horrors inflicted on her mother. There is Mira’s pain of losing her family and seeing her father shot and dying in front of her. But Unreich was adamant her mother never lost faith in humanity.
“All my life she said to me ‘in the Holocaust I learnt about the goodness of people’,” Unreich says. “I was so incredulous when I heard that. How could she not learn about the cruelty of mankind? But instead I think she focused on those who intervened to save and help her.”
