Hunters creator David Weil responds to backlash from the Auschwitz Memorial over a fictionalized Holocaust scene in the Amazon Prime Video series. Hunters is a Jordan Peele-produced series that stars Al Pacino as a Holocaust survivor who assembles a team of Nazi hunters to track down and kill several S.S. soldiers hiding out in the United States. The show portrays flashback scenes to the Holocaust in every brutal, sickening detail, but a particular scene in the pilot struck a nerve with the Auschwitz Memorial.
The scene depicts a cruel, life-sized chess game, played by a particularly evil Nazi, using Jewish captives as pieces, forcing them to murder each other for sport. A Twitter account representing the Auschwitz Memorial, which preserves the site of the former Nazi concentration camp as a museum to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, criticized the scene calling it "dangerous foolishness & caricature." The account also warned that such fictionalization "welcomes future deniers," and notes the Memorial tried to "honor the victims by preserving accuracy."
Variety reported on the initial backlash and then updated their story with a lengthy response from Weil, who is Jewish, defending his choice. "In speaking to the "chess match" scene specifically… this is a fictionalized event. Why did I feel this scene was important to script and place in series," Weil asks. "To most powerfully counteract the revisionist narrative that whitewashes Nazi perpetration, by showcasing the most extreme – and representationally truthful – sadism and violence that the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews and other victims." He goes on to explain that while it's "true that Nazis perpetrated widespread and extreme acts of sadism and torture," the creator didn't want to "depict those specific, real acts of trauma."
To further emphasize his point, Weil explains that he also decided to give all the concentration camp prisoners fictional tattoos above the number 202,499. As the writer explains, "202,499 is the highest recorded number given to a prisoner at Auschwitz. I didn't want one of our characters to have the number of a real victim or a real survivor, as I did not want to misrepresent a real person or borrow from a specific moment in an actual person's life." Weil argues that the answer to the "larger philosophical question" about making Holocaust movies and TV shows that are not strictly documentary is that "we can and should" continue, despite not always adhering to "literal truth" in pursuit of "capturing the representational truth of the Holocaust."
Hunters is an ambitious project handling delicate and vitally important subject matter. While it's clear Weil takes his job seriously, the series itself feels like a mix between heavy Holocaust drama and 70s exploitation grindhouse. Perhaps the scene in question came off as insensitive and bombastic solely for the sake of shock value, due to the heavily-stylized nature of the show.
Weil's full statement, which should be read in its entirety, makes it clear that he holds reverence for Holocaust victims. His grandmother was an Auschwitz survivor; her stories of persecution and horror are what inspired the writer to tell the story unfolding in Hunters. It's evident that he never intended to be disrespectful or offensive, but maybe he'll exercise even more caution when plotting out the events of season 2. Since Amazon has yet to officially greenlight the series, of which Weil claims to have mapped out five seasons, it may be a while before fans see if the writer adjusts his approach in the future.
Source: Variety