Rachelle Unreich on 'A Brilliant Life: My Mother's Inspiring Story of Surviving the Holocaust'

Good Reading Podcast

Over seventy years had passed since Mira Unreich was freed from a concentration camp in Germany. On that spring day in 1945, she found herself alive, against all odds. In the decades that followed, she never explained the mystery underpinning her survival. How could Mira say that in the Holocaust 'I learned about the goodness of people'? When Mira's journalist daughter Rachelle realised time was running out for Mira, who was ill with cancer, she resolved to ask her mother questions. It would be the most important interview of her life: a chance to discover the secrets to her mother's joy, and an opportunity to fit together the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her own life. Mira's words would lead Rachelle along a surprising path, where she learned for the first time what a truly extraordinary life her mother had led. In this episode Gregory Dobbs chats to Rachelle Unreich about her mother Mira's idyllic childhood interrupted by war, the time spent in concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and Mira's incredible capacity to survive and to thrive despite the horrors of her past.