‘We Were the Lucky Ones’: The Real Kurc Family’s Holocaust Survival Story

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 Ca