Warning: some readers may find this content distressing.
Rachelle Unreich's mother Mira saw her father shot dead, survived concentration camps like Auschwitz and escaped the Holocaust all before she turned 20.
When asked what saved her from all those atrocities, her answer was always the same; "The goodness of people".
So when Mira was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2016, Rachelle sat down to interview her mother about all she'd witnessed and what those words really meant.
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"She really never lost her faith in humanity, and her faith in general," Rachelle tells 9Honey.
"She had faith that tomorrow would be better than today, or that at least that it held the possibility of being better. And she had faith in humankind."
Mira's faith got her through the war, defined her life in the decades after and eventually inspired Rachelle's book, A Brilliant Life, after she died.
An unflinching record of Mira's life, the book surprised Rachelle because she didn't really go into the interviews planning to publish her mother's story.
At the time, they were simply a way to connect with her dying mother before time ran out.
"What I really wanted to find out was who she was as a person, how she came out of it not just surviving, but actually thriving and being this incredibly buoyant person," she says.
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Surviving the Holocaust
Born to Jewish parents in 1927, Miriam Blumenstock (nicknamed Mira) grew up in a tiny village in Slovakia and became a target when Nazism took hold in nearby Germany.
Her family, including four siblings, tried to hide during World War II but were discovered the night before they planned to flee their hometown in 1944.
Mira's father was shot and she, her mother and one brother were dragged away while he died at the doorstep of their home.
Just 17 at the time, she spent the rest of the war in a series of horrific concentration camps that took almost everything from her.
"There are Holocaust survivors who can't bear to make any mention of the war and she wasn't like that … she found a way to tell it that wasn't harmful to her," Rachelle says.
Even so, hearing what Mira and her family endured was devastating.
Mira's mother was executed as soon as they arrived at the first camp. Not long after, Mira's brother, who had been caught with her, died after constant forced labour and malnutrition.
Her older sister had already disappeared into another camp and was presumed dead and she had no idea where her other two brothers were.
For months, Mira was subjected to forced labour in horrific conditions and witnessed so many traumatic sights, especially after being moved to Auschwitz.
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"It was just a litany of horrors, one thing after another. She'd seen such extreme examples of brutality, and monstrous, barbaric behaviour," Rachell says.
Death was all around Mira; she was almost executed with her mother, almost died from camp conditions and could have been shot on a forced death march.
Even after the camps were liberated on Mira's 18th birthday, the horrors didn't end.
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The very first night after being freed, she and a group of female prisoners listened in horror as soldiers from the liberating army raped a woman and her daughter in the next room.
It was only because Mira had suggested barricading the door to their room with a heavy wardrobe that they escaped the same fate.
These tales only made it more miraculous to Rachelle that her mother still had faith in humankind.
"She said to me many times in her life, 'in the Holocaust, I learned about the goodness of people'. And to me, that was incredible," Rachelle says.
"How can you have seen the worst of man's cruelty and instead focus on the goodness of people?"
Telling Mira's story
Despite the horrors and atrocities she witnessed, Mira didn't just survive the Holocaust; she thrived after it.
She lived in Prague, then Paris, welcomed three children with her first husband and moved to Australia. When that marriage ended, she fell in love again and had Rachelle.
Their family was a happy one and interviewing Mira before she died just drove home how lucky Rachelle had been to have her as a mother.
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"It felt like we were taking a mother daughter holiday, one where we could laugh and love each other fiercely," she says of those final months.
When Mira died, Rachelle grieved deeply and it took years for her to realise that she held her mother's legacy in her hands and wanted to share it.
It took her just six weeks to write the first version of her book, A Brilliant Life.
"I had this fire burning within me. I sat down at my desk for six weeks and I've never written like that before. I can't help but feel that my mother had a hand in that," she says.
"I did always want to write her story … I knew that I had this really important family history that needed to be put down, eventually, but it also seemed like a really remote aspiration."
'A Brilliant Life'
Working with Holocaust museums, historians, scholars and other survivors on the book, Rachelle uncovered even more harrowing details about Mira's life.
She learned that her mother barely escaped Nazi physician Josef Mengele, who performed vile experiments on prisoners and was at one of the camps where Mira was interred.
But Rachelle is adamant that A Brilliant Life, which hit shelves on November 1, isn't a Holocaust book.
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"It's a book about mothers and daughters. It's a book about the magic in the universe, particularly about my mother's magic, and how she saw the goodness in people even in the bleakest of times," she says.
Yes, Mira survived that atrocity and it was a part of her story, but there was so much more to her life as well; so much love and light and laughter.
That's what Rachelle wants to remember.
If you or someone you know needs immediate or mental health-related support, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or via lifeline.org.au.
