We Were The Lucky Ones review: A harrowing journey through the past

There is an admirable quality in the way We Were The Lucky Ones, the Hulu limited series that premieres March 28, approaches the story of the Kurc family. As its title implies, this is a period drama about a Jewish family in Poland who survived through World War II and the Nazi occupation of their hometown. The harrowing tales of how each member managed to evade capture, circumvent persecution, and even at times narrowly escape mass massacres, are presented with an unflinching eye. That does make for an exhausting, emotionally taxing watch, but then, its subject matter requires nothing less.

Based on Georgia Hunter’s novel of the same name, in itself based on Hunter’s own family history, We Were The Lucky Ones opens in Radom, Poland. We first meet the Kurcs as they’re gathered for Passover in 1939. There are whispers of horrors and dangers, of threats and perils (abroad but also increasingly closer to home) but this modestly moneyed, well-educated family has its sights on sunny prospects—on budding romances and future grandchildren, on bright career opportunities and heartwarming personal ones. A year later, though, as Addy (Logan Lerman) hopes to travel back from Paris to Radom as he did the year before, he realizes that many of the things he and his family had taken for granted (like safe travel across Europe) are now things of the past. Soon enough, the entire Kurc clan will find itself scattered all over Europe. Siblings make arrangements to head to Russia; parents settle for staying behind—all while Addy tries to navigate his way out of Vichy France, keenly aware of what awaits him if he stays.

This is the mood for much of this Erica Lipez-developed adaptation. The Kurcs stand in for the “lucky” (luckier, even) ones: the ones who survived. But, as episode after episode bleakly asks over and over again: at what cost? The Kurcs spend much of the war unsure where their family members are, wondering who may still be alive, and questioning whether they’ll all be able to break bread together once more. Yes, the title does give away the ending toward which the series’ grueling narrative twists propel us but that doesn’t make watching the Kurc family be on the brink of constant danger any more comforting.

Every episode of We Were The Lucky Ones takes its name from a place. Its first three episodes, which will release simultaneously, have us trek from “Radom” to “Lvov” and later to “Siberia.” Each also tracks the ways the Kurcs find their everyday life is slowly whittled away to nothing. Petty discriminations on the street soon lead to legal dispossessions, to evictions, and later still to orders to be transported elsewhere (to work camps, if they’re lucky). This all happens with such brazen cruelty and swiftness that you do wonder, as young Halina (Joey King) does, why they all didn’t leave Poland when they first saw the inklings of what was to come. Except, as her parents (Lior Ashkenazi’s Sol and Robin Weigert’s Nechuma) remind her time and time again, how could they so easily leave the place they’d come to call home, the apartment they’d built with their years of labor?