We Were the Lucky Ones

It’s not a show for the faint-hearted or easily triggered. But despite the spiral of cruelty it traces, We Were the Lucky Ones remains elegantly crafted throughout. .... While the entire ensemble dignifies the legacy of these real-life victims, bringing a lived-in warmth to their characters’ interpersonal bonds, particular praise should be reserved for Joey King, who’s stunning in the role of Halina.

It occasionally struggles to find a balance between its many competing storylines. But it is also a series whose whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts, tackling themes of family, loyalty, love, trauma, and tragedy in ways that will feel almost painfully prescient when compared to our current global moment.

“We Were the Lucky Ones” is a defiant and harrowing, soul shattering story—one that gives the full range of the horrors that occur when you’ve been displaced, unmoored, and dehumanized.

As much as “We Were the Lucky Ones” tells an extraordinary story of endurance and triumph, the show never loses sight of suffering, and of what kind of person someone has to be to let that happen.

The excruciating wait for updates on family members from the Red Cross, the jarring shift back to freedom after years of oppression, the return to cities that no longer feel like home — We Were the Lucky Ones touches too briefly on these rich themes in its 73-minute finale. But it also gifts viewers with much-needed moments of ugly-cry uplift — and a reminder that there are some stories we should never stop telling.

What makes “We Are the Lucky Ones,” premiering Thursday on Hulu, work as well as it does is that it’s first and foremost a family drama; it never leaves its characters’ sides to take in the bigger picture. The Warsaw ghetto uprising is shown only as noise and smoke across a wall, glimpsed from afar.

“We Were the Lucky Ones” is relentless in its accurate portrayal of the anguish and terror imposed daily. However, the most moving aspect of the series is that it details circumstances not often seen in films and TV shows about the Holocaust.

No matter how devastating these stories get, what binds all of them together is a sense of hope — stubborn, hard-won, fainter at certain times than others but always undeniably there. So overwhelming is its sense of heart that it’s able to propel the series past some noticeable unevenness, all the way toward a finish that merits the tears it gets.

While the first episode of We Were The Lucky Ones is a bit confusing and the show has too many characters to keep track of, King’s and Lerman’s performances anchor the series and make it worth watching, even if the rest of the characters won’t get as well-explored.

The continued good luck of the Kurc family might play into the title, but it lowers the stakes at every turn. Where else have we seen a Jewish man shout at and belittle a Nazi officer and walk away with nothing more than a few bruises? Nevertheless, We Were the Lucky Ones is a worthwhile watch this spring.

It wants to celebrate the triumph of the spirit, the survival of its central family, while also mourning those whose lives were lost. It’s a tricky tonal balance to strike and for the most part the series succeeds, making its title capture the vexing uplifting message it purports to illuminate.

There is not an ounce of cynicism in it (although this is not good news for UK viewers, since in US productions an ounce of cynicism is about the amount you need to cut the schmaltz that otherwise strikes as insincere). But little is new here, and that means most of its power is generated almost automatically.