Was it Just a Matter of Luck?: A Family, the Holocaust, and the Founding of a Museum (Holocaust Survivor True Stories)

In Was it Just a Matter of Luck? Dr. Charles Kaner weaves an unflinching, moving account of his family’s survival during the Holocaust with the story of how those memories – and his mother’s fierce devotion to testimony – helped shape a new era of remembrance in America. At the heart of the narrative stands his mother, Ray Kaner, whose courage, intelligence, and will to live carried her through the ghetto and the horrors of Auschwitz, Hambüren, and Bergen-Belsen.Tracing Ray’s life from an idyllic childhood in interwar Poland through the collapse of her world, Kaner brings readers inside the Łódź Ghetto with striking immediacy: the hunger that distorted time, the humiliation of forced labor, and the desperate ingenuity that kept Ray and her sister Sally alive. Through Ray’s memories – told to her son decades later during the COVID lockdown – Kaner reconstructs the threads of chance, instinct, and resilience that repeatedly saved her life when the slightest misstep could have meant death.Parallel to his mother’s journey runs Kaner’s own: a boy raised in Brooklyn by survivors who rarely spoke of themselves; a dentist who built a life in New York; and, ultimately, an adult son determined to understand how his mother survived when so many did not. As he listens to Ray recount her childhood, the deaths of her parents, her years of slave labor, and the scars of liberation, Kaner also revisits the extraordinary second act of her life. In the 1970s, as her daughter Debbie entered high school, Ray helped pioneer one of the earliest efforts to collect survivor testimonies – grassroots work that would contribute to the founding of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Flatbush Yeshiva, a precursor to the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City.Kaner shows how Ray’s lifelong insistence on telling the truth of what she lived became a moral engine that shaped institutions, touched generations of students, and continues to shape her family’s understanding of history, family, and obligation.Both an intimate family chronicle and a sweeping historical testimony, Was it Just a Matter of Luck? reveals how a single survivor’s voice – clear, human, and uncompromising – can illuminate the Holocaust anew. It is a tribute to a mother’s strength, a son’s quest to understand, and the responsibility we all bear to remember. Read more