On Sunday, Sep. 15, the school district and city of Beverly Hills came together at El Rodeo Elementary for a Beverly Hills Reads! event with New York Times bestselling author Georgia Hunter, author of We Were the Lucky Ones, an international bestseller made into a hit series on Hulu. Inspired by Hunter’s own great-grandparents and their five children, We Were the Lucky Ones is an intense and touching book about how they became separated during the Holocaust and their subsequent efforts to survive and reunite after the war.
The event was put together by Mayor Friedman and Dr. Bregy, along with the City Council and Board of Education, the City of Beverly Hills’ Community Services Department, its Public Library, the Human Relations Commission, the BHUSD Education Services Department, the Beverly Hills Education Foundation and leadership teams.
The District said, “This community-wide literary event celebrates the love of reading and builds community connection by bringing people together to participate in an engaging and insightful book discussion.”
Author Georgia Hunter explained her research and writing process— its spark was a family visit, where she interviewed her grandmother about her grandfather who had lived in Radom, Poland during the war and was one of the five siblings torn apart from each other. Hunter traveled for research for the book and went to Paris first to interview Felicia, the only living relative with firsthand memories of the war.
“It’s important to be aware of something, especially what’s going on in the world right now,” board member Noah Margo said. “It’s kind of extra poignant, the story that’s being told here.”
The amount of travel and research for the book was remarkable, especially since her family was so global and scattered so far and wide. She found the fake identification cards that her family had used to save their lives and dug up old, meaningful photographs to help her write the book. She traveled through eastern Europe and to Radom, where no one in her family had gone back. She even found the young woman her grandfather had met on a passenger ship, Eliska, who he was engaged to before he met Hunter’s grandmother.
“To understand the journey that Georgia Hunter, the writer, went through, is incredible, and to see that she went through such extenuating circumstances,” board member Dr. Amanda Stern said. “She went all over the world, she traveled… and the far reach of this book geographically is amazing for such a horrible time, but it gave us hope to see how they all triumphed and are here to create the story for us today.”
Hunter says it was due to a lot of luck that her family survived, but also that they always seemed to have a plan that worked out. The doses of optimism involving romances, babies being born, and music being written provided her family members with regular joy and optimism that helped keep them going as well.
We Were the Lucky Ones came out on Valentine’s Day in 2017. Hunter had been keeping a blog to post her findings along the way throughout her 9 years of research, to keep her family in the loop. She invited them to her book tour, so all five of the siblings were represented in the crowd as her family members flew in to support her.
“I thought the book was fabulous. It was a wonderful read and a wonderful lesson, and they really covered a lot of it on stage today,” Margo said. “The adaptation was really very faithful to the book, so I appreciated that, but I recommend to everybody: read it before you watch it.”
Eventually, this poignant story was optioned for the screen. Hunter organized a talented group that met every day, five hours a day, for five months in a row, to translate the book to visual content. An all-Jewish cast was hired and they began to go through the process of bringing the story to life. Hunter’s family came to visit on set, and it was very emotional to see the family come to life on the screen. Many cast members and writers came up to her thanking her for trusting them with this story.
“We did everything we could to do it justice,” Hunter said.
Both the book and the series have become very popular. “One striking feature, not often seen in Holocaust dramas, is the edge of adventure that exists amid the terror, with these all being young, attractive, dynamic people who are about as mobile and resilient as it gets,” Rotten Tomatoes says. “It’s been commissioned, created, acted and broadcast in absolute good faith.”
Hunter provided a family tree at the front of the book so readers could keep track of her characters. It was difficult at times for Hunter to capture all the different emotions that the siblings felt.
“My favorite part of the book was probably the scene where Mila and Felicia were about to be killed by the Russians,” senior Ari Cohn said. “And it was so heartbreaking to have to be within that scene, but then we realize how incredible they persevered. They were able to stop themselves from falling in the grave and make it out.”
The field scene where Mila was digging her own grave was one of the hardest for Hunter to write. She said that she had to separate herself from the reality of it in order to write it, and she worried about shooting the scene for the series because it was very climactic and horrific.
“I thought it was particularly poignant and sad when she was digging the grave, and the little girl, the child, just looked on,” Stern said. “I just thought, what was going through the child’s mind while her mother was forced to dig their own grave for the family?”
Hearing Hunter’s story and the efforts she went to in order to bring her family history and the importance of education about the Holocaust and what happened inspired many students.
“It’s so amazing to just hear from her and the story of her family, and it’s just so inspirational,” Cohn said. “I just really think it’s one of my favorite novels ever because of how informative [it was]. And it just really brings about the part of the Holocaust and how horrible that was. I’m grateful for that, to be able to learn from her experience and story.”
The chance to hear from the author of this renowned book that stands on so much research and family history was invaluable to students of the district and the Beverly Hills community as a whole.
“I am so grateful that the district was able to partner with the city to make this such a memorable event, and that we actually were able to get this world renowned author to visit us and give us her personal take,” Stern said. “That is such a legacy to our school.”
