Mild spoilers for We Were the Lucky Ones ahead.
The opening episode of We Were the Lucky Ones, the first three installments of which are now streaming on Hulu, finds the sprawling Kurc family around a boisterous dinner table in Radom, Poland. Joey King’s Halina, entertaining a romance with family friend Adam (Sam Woolf), laughs alongside her brother Addy (Logan Lerman), who has returned home from Paris for Passover. Their parents, Sol (Lior Ashkenazi) and Nechuma (Robin Weigert), press eldest daughter Mila (Hadas Yaron) about the forthcoming arrival of her first child. Their son Jakob (Amit Rahav) relishes in bringing his girlfriend, Bella (Eva Feiler), home to spend the holiday with his family, as does his older brother, Genek (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), who has begun dating Herta (Moran Rosenblatt). What the Kurcs don’t know is that their hometown will soon be under Nazi control—and this will be their last Passover together for the next decade.
As World War II begins, the Kurcs will be forced out of Radom and displaced across the globe— from Siberia and France to West Africa and Brazil. During the Holocaust, each member of the family will faced various atrocities: Mila and her newborn daughter endure harsh factory conditions before she eventually stashes her child in a Warsaw convent. Genek and Herta are condemned to a Soviet labor camp. The series details the family’s struggle to survive, and their harrowing attempts at reunification.
“By the end of the Holocaust, 90% of Poland’s three million Jews were annihilated,” the series reminds viewers at the outset. But as the show’s title implies, all immediate members of the Kurc family are fortunate enough to live through the genocide and remain doggedly devoted to reuniting.
Created by Erica Lipez and directed by Thomas Kail, We Were the Lucky Ones is based on the bestselling 2017 novel by Georgia Hunter, who also serves as co-executive-producer on the project. Hunter’s debut book was inspired by the actual story of her family. “There were over 20 survivors in all, including my grandfather and his siblings, parents, cousins and in-laws,” she writes in a blog post on her website. “Together, they accounted for nearly 7% of the total number of Jewish survivors in their hometown of Radom (the city’s thriving prewar population of 30,000 Jews shrank to fewer than 300 after the Holocaust).”
While her family’s tale of survival is a staggering one, Hunter was not aware of their plight–or even her Jewish heritage–until age 15. A year after her grandfather Addy died of Parkinson’s disease in 1993, Hunter was tasked with interviewing her grandmother for a school English project. “I sat with my grandmother Caroline and I will never forget that hour I spent with her, sitting in her home and discovering that my grandfather was from this town called Radom, Poland, that he was one of five siblings, that he was raised in the Jewish faith, and that I came from a family of Holocaust survivors,” the author previously told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Addy, a musician and engineer who later changed his name to Eddy, didn’t mean to keep his past “some big secret,” Hunter recalled her grandmother saying, “but rather a chapter of his life he’d chosen to leave behind.” She added that “becoming an American, changing his name, and building a successful career…were his ways of moving on, and of protecting his children.”
Survivors’ guilt may have also factored into her grandfather’s decision, said Hunter in another interview. “Perhaps the fact that the entire family survived intact—there were 22 in all—played a part in that,” she explained. “They were a statistical anomaly, which is unbelievably fortunate but not something they’d have boasted about. More than that, though, it simply wasn’t in my grandfather’s DNA to dwell on the past. He had this very positive, vibrant, forward-thinking outlook on life.”
No matter Addy’s reasoning, Hunter has said that learning about her family’s history at an older age catalyzed her desire to write about it. “I wonder often how knowing about my Jewish ancestry as a child might have shaped me as a person,” Hunter said. “I believe, however, that the shock of making the discovery later in life sparked an intense curiosity, and an insatiable thirst for answers,” which she sought to find over the course of a nine-year research process that began in 2008 and spanned seven countries.
Hunter, who grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, would interview Holocaust experts, visit museums and archives, and even go to her ancestors’ home in Radom, Poland, which gets recreated in the series. “We visited the apartment building where my family lived, and I got chills running my fingers along a rusted mezuzah still adhered to the cement arched entranceway,” she recounted in a 2017 interview.
In February 2008, Hunter traveled to Paris, where Felicia—Mila’s daughter, who was an infant at the start of WWII and six years old by V-E Day—lived as one of the only remaining members of the Kurc family. “To this day, I’m still amazed at the lucidity with which Felicia was able to recall the details of her wartime experiences,” Hunter writes on her website: “the long coat her mother sewed as a part of a scheme to escape the ghetto…the thunderous stomp of German boots patrolling just inches from her hiding spot at a uniform factory where her mother worked…the stench of peroxide the nuns at the Catholic convent used to bleach her auburn hair blond, so she’d fit in with the other children.”
Felicia’s estrangement from her mother plays out in both Hunter’s novel and the new Hulu series. Later episodes show Addy’s brief engagement to a fellow passenger while aboard a ship of European refugees fleeing Europe for South America, and the time Adam, who was living in Warsaw with Halina under false papers, devised a way to shield the fact that he was circumcised from a landlord who accused him of being Jewish.
