The Big Picture

• We Were the Lucky Ones is a limited series on Hulu based on a New York Times bestselling novel about a Jewish family enduring and surviving the Holocaust.
• Author Georgia Hunter drew inspiration from her own family history to write the book, uncovering her grandfather's experience as a Holocaust survivor.
• The series takes the audience on a journey through the war and post-war periods, as the family faces the Nazi invasion, hides for their lives, and eventually seeks to reunite with loved ones scattered across the globe.

We Were the Lucky Ones is a limited series that has one of history’s most traumatic events as its backdrop. Based on the New York Times best-selling novel of the same name by Georgia Hunter, the show chronicles the saga of a European Jewish family before, during, and after World War II and, of course, the Holocaust. Starring Joey King and Logan Lerman, the series follows the Kurc family as they face the Nazi invasion of Poland and everything that comes after, hiding for their lives or struggling to survive as they are shipped off to concentration camps. The story goes on to show us what happened after the war, when the family — having survived the horrors of war and genocide — sets off on another journey, now looking to reunite with their loved ones who have been scattered across the world.

With The Morning Show’s Erica Lipez as showrunner and Hamilton’s Thomas Kail set to direct episodes, We Were the Lucky Ones has everything to captivate audiences with a touching tale about what it takes to survive in one of humanity’s darkest hours, repeating the feat of the 2017 book on which it is based. Hunter took inspiration from her own life to write the story of the Kurc family — or, rather, she turned the history of her own family into a novel, researching and writing about real-life events to get in touch with her heritage.

Georgia Hunter Spent Many Years Unaware of Her Jewish Heritage

Hunter spent a decade and a half of her life completely unaware of her Jewish heritage and the fact that her beloved grandfather, Eddy Courts (played by Lerman in the series), was a Holocaust survivor. Registered as Addy Kurc, Courts was a composer and engineer when he met his wife, a South Carolina-born woman, in Rio de Janeiro in the final throes of the war. His trip to the former Brazilian capital was far from uneventful. Working in Paris as a composer in 1939, Courts reached South America through Africa, on a journey quite similar to the one portrayed in Michael Curtiz’s classic Casablanca. Courts spent years in Brazil not knowing what happened to his family. This changed, however, when he received a telegram from the Red Cross informing him that they had all survived.

This formative story was completely unknown to Hunter up until her teenage years. After her grandfather’s death, via The CT Post, Hunter was doing an interview with her grandmother for a school project. That was when she found out the first few pieces of information about the Kurc family history. All of a sudden, the author became aware not only of the fact that she was a quarter Jewish, but also that her grandfather and his siblings had managed to survive a genocide.

“I wish I could go back and ask my grandfather why he never talked about his Holocaust-era past,” Hunter told Sound Watch magazine.

“Perhaps the fact that the entire family survived intact - there were 22 in all - played a part in that. 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.”

But with or without her grandfather in the picture, Hunter was still full of questions and continued her inquiries at a family gathering years later, in 2000, right after she had graduated from university. The stories she heard were nearly unbelievable, and she immediately saw the potential for a novel, but it took her another handful of years to actually kickstart the project. It was only in 2008 that Hunter took her digital recorder on a trip, initially approaching the Kurcs' past as a family historian, looking for relatives all over the world and interviewing them to better understand how their ancestors, or even sometimes themselves, managed to come out alive on the other side of such a horrifying event. Hunter also reached out to archives, ministries, museums, and other institutions that might hold records about her family’s history. The author makes it clear that the internet was crucial to her research: “If I had tried to tackle this research before the digital age, this book certainly wouldn’t be what it is today,” she told Sound Watch.

Georgia Hunter Is Pretty Secretive About the Details of ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’

This research took Hunter to Paris, then to Rio, then back to the States, and so on… Eventually, the information she gathered took her to Radom, Poland — her grandfather’s hometown. When speaking with interviewers, the author tends to be very secretive about the details of what she discovered to avoid spoiling the events of We Were the Lucky Ones — both the book and the show. Still, she often shares some stories that she unearthed while digging through her family’s history. One of them is that of Felicia (Artemisia Pagliano), an elderly woman who was less than a year old when Hitler invaded Poland. By 2019, Felicia was living a happy life in Paris, but, as a child, she had her mother bribe an SS officer with her own wedding ring in order to save them from a mass grave and was forced to hide in a convent that was later bombed.

Another story that Hunter frequently shares is that of her great-uncle Genek (Henry Lloyd-Hughes), who was sent to a gulag in Siberia alongside his wife, Herta (Moran Rosenblatt). There the couple had their first son, Jozef (Eric Olaru). For decades, no one knew why Genek and Herta were sent to Siberia, but Hunter uncovered documents detailing the story after joining a Yahoo group for people with ties to the Russian region. After being released from the gulag, Genek fought for the Allies and was present at the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. He was awarded war medals that remained unclaimed up until Hunter came around. Upon claiming the medals, she delivered them to Genek’s children and grandchildren.

From interviews to documents to three first-hand accounts registered by the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the material that Hunter managed to put her hands on helped her paint a pretty vivid picture of what her grandfather and his siblings, as well as their parents and children, went through during the war. It is a story that features chapter upon chapter of ordeals such as crossing all but frozen rivers and living entire lives in hiding, not to mention those that ended up in concentration camps. All the events portrayed in We Were the Lucky Ones are true, with Hunter using her own voice only to recreate her characters’ POV, describing how frightened or cold they must have felt on a certain occasion, or filling up blanks with historical information. Hunter’s goal in recreating these events in a somewhat fictionalized way, the author told Book Club Babble, was to allow her readers to step into her relatives’ lives:

“While my narrative is based on actual people and real events, I decided in the end to allow myself the creative license to fictionalize it - to add those human, emotional details I wasn’t able to uncover in my research, such as what my characters were thinking and saying and feeling. I also opted to write the book in the present tense. These decisions, I hoped, would make the story feel less like a lesson in history, and more visceral, more relevant to today’s reader - and perhaps even bring the story even closer to the truth.”

Some of the atmosphere that Hunter creates in her novel may certainly be lost in the Hulu adaptation. Still, we will also get new layers of projection that will help make the story more palpable to us. It will no doubt be a harrowing experience, but it’s a story that deserves to be told. And, considering the ending, with the Kurc family entirely alive, albeit scattered across the world, it might even have its dose of hope.

We Were the Lucky Ones is available to stream on Hulu starting March 28.

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