The journey of Georgia Hunter’s bestselling novel-turned-hit-show “We Were the Lucky Ones” was one full of unexpected turns.
It all started with the discovery, at age 15, that her beloved maternal grandfather, Eddy, was a Holocaust survivor and that her family was in fact Jewish. Then, as an adult, there was an almost decade-long labor of telling the tale of her grandfather’s family — two parents, five siblings — all of whom survived the war through impossible luck and resourcefulness. That fictionalized tale became a novel, which then, thanks in part to her friend director Thomas Kail, became a TV show. Production took her on a journey through Romania and brought the most glamorous young stars to the project: Joey King and Logan Lerman, along with Israel’s biggest screen stars, from Michael Aloni to Hadas Yaron to Lior Ashkenazi and Amit Rahav.
“We Were the Lucky Ones” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, perhaps the best TV show made about the Holocaust.
Now, Georgia Hunter is taking us on a new journey. Her sophomore novel, “One Good Thing” came out in March and it, too, tells a rich Holocaust tale. While this book is still deeply anchored in facts and history, the characters are, this time, pure fiction. It’s about the friendship of Jewish Italian Lili and Greek Jewish Esti, who meet at university and become inseparable, and what happens when they, along with Esti’s toddler son Theo, go on a journey of survival, hiding from the deadly threats of Nazi occupation.
The beauty of Hunter’s Holocaust novels is that they’re never concerned with didacticism or sensation. Her heroes are tenderly drawn, designed to evoke deep feelings in the reader. At a time when making Holocaust tales come alive feels more important than ever before, Hunter rises to the task, making her readers not only understand but feel the journey of these survivors.
Hunter spoke to Kveller about what it means to follow up the phenomenon of “We Were the Lucky Ones” and why she wants to keep telling these captivating Holocaust stories.
How has your life been since the show came out?
It has been such a magical experience, [both] launching it and then coming together with the cast and crew and production teams to talk about it. I’m still talking about it a lot. It’s such a relevant story, sadly.
How did the story of “One Good Thing” come to you?
It took a minute, to be honest. The first project was so personal, and I never went into it thinking it would be a best selling novel or a TV show… I went into it as a granddaughter and family historian and it took so long… It was almost a decade of researching, recording it. So when the publisher said, what’s next, I really had to take a beat, because there wasn’t an obvious answer.
I wanted it to be something that I really cared deeply about. Something I could live with for a very long time. And I kept coming back to Europe and World War II, to the Holocaust, to the untold stories. The stories that would otherwise maybe disappear. And for me, Italy was that. I knew very little about Italy’s story, the history of the Holocaust there. There aren’t a lot of Holocaust books set in Italy; I liked the idea of trying to bring the story to life through the eyes of a young, ordinary woman living through it.
And Italy is also a very special place for me because my parents actually met there. They’re both American, but they were living there for separate reasons. My mom was running a clothing shop and my dad was actually acting. Do you know what a Spaghetti Western is? It’s basically the Italian version of a Western movie. So he was doing that. And they met through the expat community and fell in love and stayed there for a combined 17 years. I was born in the States, but grew up hearing about it… it holds a special place in my heart. It felt like an obvious choice between the subject matter of the Holocaust and then the setting.
I don’t want to spoil the book too much but there is an American character in the book who is also a soldier and an actor, Thomas, who comes to Lili’s aid — was he inspired by your father?
He’s kind of a mix of my dad and my husband, who are both from the South, and just such gentlemen and such big-hearted people. My dad passed away six years ago, and it was so nice to bring him back to life in that character.
I love that through Esti, who comes from Rhodes to study in Bologna, you brought the story of Greek Jews to this story. What was the inspiration for that?
The inspiration goes back further to a trip I took in 2011 with my husband and his dad. We tooled around the Greek Islands and ended up wandering through the back streets of Rhodes. I think we were lost — we definitely were not trying to get somewhere — and we bumped into this synagogue where this gentleman let us in and showed us around. It’s amazing. They’ve done a great job preserving it. And he started telling me a little about the history of the Jews of Rhodes and how it’s one of the oldest synagogues in Greece. And so I remember being like — What did we just stumble into? And it stayed with me.
And then, I read a beautiful article in the Times about a woman named Stella Levi; there’s a book written about her called “One Hundred Saturdays,” where a gentleman sat with her and got her story over 100 days. I heard her speak in New York, and hearing her tell stories about what it was like to live as a kid on this island and run barefoot through the streets and swim on the beach and dive off on the rocks, it just felt so normal, and it was so beautiful to get a human perspective of what it was like there before. And it’s sort of like Italy, Rome, Florence, these cities, you have this very romantic lens of what they’re like. And they are — they’re incredible places. They’re on everybody’s bucket list. But then you start to realize, what it would have actually been like to be there at the time [of the Holocaust]. And so I was just so inspired by her story, between that and having been there.
In the book, Lili and Theo — Esti’s son — survive together. I have sons around the same age as Theo in the book, and I just loved the ways you describe the interactions between the two.
In “We Were the Lucky Ones,” I was so devoted to telling a family story — it’s all centered around this one family and their mission to survive, but also to find each other again. And so for the second book, I thought the theme of motherhood would be really powerful for me, personally, to lean into. I became a mom partway through writing “We Were the Lucky Ones.” And then my second was born in 2017 so he’s 7 now, but he was the age of Theo as I was starting to write this book.
I also really wanted to lean into friendship, and think about that with the dynamic between Lili and Esti. I drew from my own bonds with my dearest group of girlfriend — the type of people you do anything for and they do anything for you. And there’s always the first friend who has a baby, right? And you’re like, Oh my God, you’re crazy, and, what’s this gonna do to our friendship?
Theo ends up bringing them closer. Then there’s the interesting question of what do you do when you have to play surrogate mother to someone else’s child, when you don’t feel like you’re necessarily ready to be a mother. I just thought that was so interesting, and probably was the role that many had to play during that time, whether they were taking a child for a friend, or taking in a refugee child. And as a mother, how do you send your child away? I thought about that a lot with Mila and her daughter Felicia [in “We Were the Lucky Ones”]. How do you trust your child in the hands of someone else? I asked myself how I personally would have responded in that moment… maybe readers will ask themselves the same.
I’ve learned so much being a mom. Kids teach you so much. And I think Lili finds herself in this position where she feels totally helpless, there’s so much uncertainty, there’s darkness and destruction all around her, and yet she’s forced to step into this role of caretaker. And what does that mean for her? And I just found that such a beautiful concept to explore.
What do you think being Jewish means to these characters?
Italy is so interesting… Italy’s Jews were so well-assimilated leading up to when Mussolini came into power in the early ’20s. Then [in 1938,] he put out a set of laws called the Racial Laws, which were similar to the Nuremberg Laws in Germany, that basically said Italians are of an Aryan pure race, and Jews are not — and then he started chipping away at their basic human rights. Everything I’ve read and learned indicates that the Jews in Italy were completely blindsided by that. And I just found it so interesting to step into the shoes of someone who would have been living there and imagine what it would have felt like. Some probably would have been horribly offended, and maybe left the country. Some maybe would have taken Esti’s stance, which is more like, “It’s just a piece of paper. He is just trying to appease Hitler. All this is gonna go away when the war is over.”
It forces Lili to reconcile the two parts of her, the Italian part and the Jewish part. I grappled with what it meant, and I allowed Lili to also grapple with that. So she asks herself those questions, and she wonders whether taking on an Aryan identity [to survive] is the right choice, and then, in the end, decides that’s her way of resisting. Instead of giving up. It wasn’t that her Judaism dictated her life before the war, but it forced her to think about it in a way that is similar to how I was forced to think about the piece of my Jewish heritage once I discovered that I came from a family of Holocaust survivors. Oh, this is a part of my DNA. What does that mean for me? And I think that’s sort of a universal experience.
What were some of the stories or details that you were the most surprised to discover as you were researching this book? For example, there’s a scene where Lili and her dad go to the movie theater and find themselves in the middle of a screening of an antisemitic film, having antisemitic notes thrown at them from the balcony.
Small examples like that were eye opening to me, because that’s an everyday thing I could have seen myself doing — just going to a movie with my dad. There was a villa that was secretly housing Jewish refugee children… when I read about that group, I knew I’d find a way to weave them into Lili’s story. There were 70-something in all… they had all these kids piled into this giant villa. I have photographs of it. And [at one point] they caught wind that the Germans would be there by morning, so overnight, these volunteers had to find safe haven for 70 children in this tiny speck of a town. Every single person in that town opened their door and took in a child and kept them safe until they were able to leave, which was a long time. There were raids. The Germans would come looking and hunting. They’d heard about this villa. They knew it existed — this program to help the children. So I was just in awe of that.
Another one, hopefully not too much of a spoiler: There’s a famous Catholic Italian cyclist who had won everything — all these Italian races, the Tour de France — he was like a superhero in Italy — Gino Bartali. And he got connected with the the underground and with the church that, for the most part, was trying to do good things for the Jews. And so he was helping to shuttle falsified IDs in the frame of his bike to and from Florence. I thought that was really cool, and I wove him into this story.
You were like, I can’t pass up on this one!
I couldn’t pass Gino up. There were so many. There were so many.
What do you think anchors you to this time period?
I can’t say that it’s one thing in particular; it’s more so just a feeling. I’m drawn to it, and perhaps that’s because of my personal connection to it, and that this is a connection that came later in life. It’s a part of my ancestry and my DNA. I certainly never set out with “We Were the Lucky Ones” to make a point. I really try not to make any points in my books. I try to just tell a human story, and people can kind of take away what they will from it. But as we get further and further away from the Holocaust, as there’s this crazy rise in antisemitism, as there are more and more Holocaust deniers, as young people don’t even know about the Holocaust anymore… I do feel like stories that are set in that time period and that maybe help tell the history in a way that doesn’t feel like history — that feels a little bit more modern and relevant — are really important right now.
Is there perhaps a TV adaptation in the works for “One Good Thing,” too?
We’re floating it. We’ll see. I sort of see it more as a film than a series, but I’m very aware of how lucky I was to have the first one actually made. I know it’s very rare. But hey, who knows! Things can happen, and I’m much more concerned about if it were to happen, it falling into the right hands with people who will care for it in the way that I cared for it.
You were so lucky with “We Were the Lucky Ones.” Everyone working on the show really treated it like it was their baby.
Absolutely, so lucky. I was on a podcast and the interviewer was like, what would you do differently if you got to do a new adaptation? I was like, literally, nothing. The same show runner, the same heads of the department, the same crew, like, we’ll go to Romania too. It was just beautiful from start to finish.
