WHEN AUSTRALIAN journalist and former Harper’s BAZAAR Australia writer Rachelle Unreich began writing her late mother’s Holocaust survival story in A Brilliant Life, it spawned an unravelling, and begged the bigger question of how could someone who had witnessed so much tragedy, live her life with such profound eternal optimism?
Once liberated at the end of World War II aged 18, her mother Mira got married and moved to Prague, Belgium, Milan and later Paris before 13 years before migrating to Melbourne with her young family. There she married a second time, and her fourth child Rachelle was born.
Forced to stop school at the age of 12 because she was Jewish, she spent her teen years in four concentration camps including Auschwitz, but Mira never allowed the darkness of the Holocaust —and the loss of loved ones — get in the way of the future she envisioned for herself.
As for all the tragedies she witnessed, Unreich says her mother was larger than life and made up for lost time.
“Mira was a buoyant personality,” Unreich began. “She walked into the room and didn’t steal the limelight, but gave something back that people responded to. There was a bit of magic about her which I tried to convey writing this book,” she said.
For someone who had walked the Death Marches and survived, witnessed Holocaust resistor Roza Robota hanged, and saw her father murdered, Mira possessed a will to live that left her daughter with more questions than answers at first, and a curiosity that intensified as she got older.
“People were always drawn to Mira’s sunniness,” Unreich shared. “She really did believe people were inherently good and the world was a kind place. She always had faith that in the future there was a possibility of happiness even if you didn’t feel it today. Her father used to say there is no word such as I can’t. It would drive her nuts if I ever said I can’t do things. She said you can and that there’s no such thing.”
Unreich interviewed Mira during her final stages of her terminal cancer, documenting her memories of life pre-war and life in the camp. Unreich intercepts the dark moments with stories of family rituals, her mother’s superstitions and occasional vivid dreams that predicted things that would and did happen. She also provides sweet relief for the reader by weaving in present day anecdotes. She tells Mira’s story with a gracious tenderness, yet for all its brutality, we’re comforted knowing that while life didn’t start the way she anticipated, Mira was loved and adored throughout her life.
When Mira married a second time in Australia to Unreich’s father Manny; they lived in an Elwood apartment where actress Rachel Griffiths did for a period too. This connection saw Griffiths offer to voice the audio book, a labour of love —recorded over 12 hours and plenty of tears.
Rachelle travelled to Paris with her mother on several occasions, and learned about her mother’s love of fashion and modelling days during the ’40s. Mira loved shawls and brooches (accessories were her go to),but also investment pieces that stood the test of time — including haute couture. It was while she was living in Paris that Dior’s landmark debut collection, The New Look, emerged.
“The way she wore clothes influenced me. You bought garments carefully and you used them properly and you patched them up,” Unreich said.
“My mother retained a lot. She was a modern woman who arrived in Australia in her thirties and worked her whole life. She was independent, forthright and formidable. If her education hadn’t been robbed from her, she would have been a CEO of a company. She was whip-smart and motivated and had furious energy, and she loved to dress up.”
Paris was her chance to live freely and in the moment.
“She was passionate about Australia and saw her future here, but she was madly in love with Paris — this city of flickering lights that entranced her. She was captivated by the fashion, culture and everything it had to offer. She would befriend designers at haute couture stores and when seasons finished, they’d sell her clothes for less as she was the same size as the models. She brought some pieces to Melbourne and she would still get comments for them,” Unreich said.
Fast forward to Melbourne, when the Fiorucci store opened on Toorak Road, Unreich recalls going there as a 12-year-old to shop with Mira.
“I bought a grey and red gingham dress and my mother bought a dress with a hood and silk lining. When the lining frayed, she relined it again herself. That was still hanging her closet at the end of her life as were two beautiful Megan Park scarves I gifted her and reclaimed once she passed,” Unreich said.
If A Brilliant Life were a painting, it would be hanging in a Palazzo in Italy among the classic chiaroscuro paintings of Caravaggio — a technique from the Renaissance era where the contrast of light and dark brushstrokes tells the whole story with some melancholy shades. Unreich has cleverly painted her mother’s story in all its shades of glory and despair; a woman who stepped into the canvas of life and painted her own bright fulfilling future.
“I saw her sad sometimes when we went to synagogue to say memorial prayers for those departed and she would be solemn in those times, but I never saw her break down,” Unreich said.
“As I get older, I appreciate even more what a joyous mother she was. It was a choice and she chose to have faith and look forward.”
“Being in a concentration camp, it would have been easy to say it would never come to an end. There was a time she was ready to die, because she was so weak and ill, but she never gave up,” Unreich said.
“They often spoke about what life looked like on the other side in camp and the only way forward was to remember humanity. She believed in the ability of an individual to make a difference.
A Brilliant Life is out now via Hachette Australia.
Related: Fully booked: The best new releases in November 2023
