The drama series We Were the Lucky Ones, based on Georgia Hunter’s best-selling novel of the same name, premiered its first four episodes Mar. 28, 2024 on Hulu. The show follows a Jewish family who is separated during the Holocaust.
Developed by Erica Lipez and directed by Hamilton’s Thomas Kail, the series has eight episodes and stars Joey King and Logan Lerman as members of the Kurc family.
We Were the Lucky Ones has received positive early reception from critics. Variety’s Aramide Tinubu called the show “intense” and often deeply upsetting” and praised King’s performance as “astonishing,” and Roger Ebert’s Robert Daniels called it a “defiant and harrowing, soul shattering story.”
When adapting the story into a 2017 novel, Georgia Hunter was inspired by her family’s history after working on a school assignment.
“I had a high school English teacher assign us a project when I was 15 to go out and interview a relative to learn something about yourself and about your roots,” Hunter told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2018.
“I had lost my grandfather Addy, who you meet in chapter one of the book, the year before. So I sat with my grandmother, Caroline, and she told me about this piece of my grandfather’s past: that he was Polish and came from this big family of Holocaust survivors,” she explained.
Lerman (pictured above) portrays the late Addy in the television series.
The author clarifies that she wasn’t aware that she was going to write a book based on the family stories at the time. Then, years later when her mother held a family reunion, she began hearing more stories about her “greater Kurc family story.”
“A cousin who was born in Siberia. Parents who were married in hiding. I heard these bits and pieces of stories unlike anything I had ever heard before and I think it was then that the idea was seeded to someday write the story down,” Hunter said.
In an interview with Sarah’s Book Shelves, Hunter spoke of other resources she turned to while she processed the first-hand accounts she heard from her family. “Where there were gaps in my timeline, I looked to outside resources—to archives, museums, ministries, and magistrates around the world, in hopes of tracking down relevant information,” she said.
During this time, she sent family records and letters to translators around the world and sought information from several organizations.
Though the story depicts the Kurc family’s real journey, Hunter has admitted to fictionalizing certain parts. While speaking with Book Club Babble, the author shared that she wanted to tell the story “in a way that did the family justice,” but also engaged readers. “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,” she explained.
When it comes to the TV adaptation, Hunter worked on the series with Lipez and Kail, and brought family artifacts to set. “I had photographs, I had some music,” Hunter said in an interview with People. “Logan [Lerman] carries the same snake skin wallet that my grandfather carried, and Robin [Weigert], who plays Nechuma, wears the same broach that my great-grandmother wore.”
Hunter also answered questions from the cast, to ensure accuracy and help them connect with their characters. She said in the same People interview, “There were a lot of questions about trying to get to the core of who these people were… They really just wanted to get to know my relatives on a very personal level and [asked] questions that you’ll never see in a script or that show up in a show: ‘What were their quirks? Did their parents sing them any special lullabies? What did they like to read? What kind of parents are they now today?'”
We Were the Lucky Ones is streaming on Hulu.