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The author Georgia Hunter grew up hearing that her granduncle kept a fake penis foreskin on hand in case he had to show proof that he wasn’t Jewish in Warsaw during the Holocaust.
As the story was told to Hunter, her relative, an architect named Adam, was so desperate not to be discovered as Jewish that he stuck a bandage on his member with an egg white and water mixture. When a landlord’s wife confronted him, accusing him of hiding his real identity, he dropped his pants in front of her. The getup fooled her. The woman apologized profusely and hurried out of the apartment.
That moment, depicted in Hunter’s 2017 novel We Were the Lucky Ones, appears in an episode of the TV adaptation of the same name, out Mar. 28 on Hulu. Adam (played by Sam Woolf) and Hunter’s grandaunt Halina (Joey King) collapse in giggles afterwards at the great lengths he went to hide his Jewish identity. But it was just one of many life or death situations that Adam and his family faced trying to stay alive during the Holocaust.
The novel and Hulu show are inspired by the Kurc family, Hunter’s real great-grandparents and their five children who got separated when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. The eight-episode series is all about their efforts to come back together, and how they manage to survive and reunite after the war. Showrunners got to work off of a decade of research that Hunter, a co-executive producer, did for the novel, like oral histories available via USC’s Shoah Foundation. And several scenes in the movie are recreated from family photographs that Hunter tracked down over the years across the globe.
Hunter first learned that her grandfather Addy (Logan Lerman), a composer and engineer who lived in France when the war first broke out, came from a long line of Holocaust survivors while doing a family history assignment in high school. She then assumed the role of the family’s historian, trying to learn as much about this dark chapter in her relatives’…
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