LOS ANGELES – Joey King admits she’s not a performer who gets caught up in characters’ emotions. But there was something about “We Were the Lucky Ones” that gave her pause.
“I got really emotional with some of the very simple scenes,” she says. “It was obviously empathy, but it just was a lot.”
The story follows a Jewish family torn apart during World War II. King, who is Jewish, plays Halina Kurc, one of the family’s children determined to reunite.
“Acknowledging the pain and suffering of one community of people does not diminish the pain and suffering of another community,” she says.
Logan Lerman, who plays her brother in the series, says there are parallels with contemporary situations. “For me, it’s about empathizing with a refugee in any conflict,” he says. “You can take something away from every character’s storyline.”
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Author Georgia Hunter pulled those stories from interviews she had with friends and relatives. While her book, also called “We Were the Lucky Ones,” isn’t based on one specific family, it includes situations that actual people were in.
“I collected oral histories. I had the Shoah Foundation recording my family speaking. I went around the world and collected from databases…any kind of records I could find and then we multiplied that tenfold for our series,” she says.
The goal was to reach a generation that hadn’t heard the Holocaust stories. “Gen Z, they don’t really know or care about the Holocaust,” King says. “It’s super important to share…and educate.”
Adds Lerman: “This is about what happens when hate goes unchecked. You can learn from the past and apply that to current times.”
His character, based on Hunter’s grandfather, never talked about his past.
“That was just not a part of our dialogue,” Hunter says. “It’s a piece of his history that I discovered a year after he died, when I was 15, thanks to a high school English assignment and an interview with my grandmother Caroline.”
Hunter became curious about others in her family; at a reunion of her mother’s cousins, she got more stories about the war – “stories unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I was 21 and I was thinking, ‘Someone needs to write these down.' I didn’t know that someone would be me.”
During the research process, Hunter learned her grandfather was a composer. Two of his works are used in the series.
“They’re very challenging,” Lerman says. “He was a brilliant, brilliant writer.”
Lerman, who is also Jewish, says his own family has a story similar to the one in the miniseries. “My family ended up in China,” he says. “That was interesting to me because I haven’t seen that side of this history explored in any form of narrative storytelling. I was able to bring my family and my identity and my cultural background to this.”
For director Tommy Kail, the journey to get “We Were the Lucky Ones” on the air was a long one. “Georgia and I met in 1999 and Georgia’s book came out in 2017. She had worked for eight or nine years getting the book ready. It was optioned in 2018 and, now, six year later, it exists in this form.”
Erica Lipez, who adapted the story for television, says she never saw a story like this set during the Holocaust. “It was such an intimate story told through this one family and centered on 12 distinct Jewish characters,” she says. Too often, Holocaust stories “are from the perspective of the perpetrators or of the people trying to help the Jews.”
The family members, scattered across four continents, have specific goals and different ways of achieving them.
Says Hunter: “We’re bringing that history back to life but we’re trying to do it in a way that feels very human and through a modern lens. We’re kind of getting rid of that black-and-white, sepia tone and telling it in a way that, hopefully audiences can relate to.”
"We Were the Lucky Ones" airs on Hulu.