We Were the Lucky Ones — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Critical response

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 95% approval rating with an average rating of 8/10, based on 22 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "Equal parts harrowing and life-affirming, We Were the Lucky Ones is a sensitively told tale of perseverance given tear-inducing heart by its wonderful ensemble." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the limited series a "generally favorable" score of 80 out of 100, based on 13 critics.

RogerEbert.com concluded that "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." Aramide Tinibu of Variety also praised the series: "Spending extended time with each member of the Kurcs allows the viewer to get into their psyche while absorbing differing perspectives and opinions instead of a monolithic overview of Holocaust survivors."

The Jewish parenting website Kveller praised the series as "a visceral, touching, sweeping and profoundly human show, one of the best you'll see all year, and the Jewish representation in it is deeply thoughtful, perhaps more than any show I’ve ever seen." The Boston Globe concluded: "So yes, the miniseries is challenging, and steeped in heartbreak, and unrelenting. But it joins a growing inventory of important, eye-opening, memorable, and timely TV takes on the Holocaust and World War II. Ultimately it is as rewarding as it is harrowing."

Israeli journalist Shimon Briman and Ukrainian historian and Holocaust researcher Andrii Usach criticized the way the series depicted the Lviv pogroms. They pointed out that the series depicted the crowd of pogrom-mongers as entirely Ukrainian, with Ukrainian and Nazi flags. In reality, the participants in the pogrom did not have flags, and according to the memoirs of the victims, there were both Poles and Ukrainians in the crowd. According to Shimon Briman "a scene was purposefully included in this American series to link Ukraine's contemporary realities to the pogrom and deliberately emphasize the Ukrainian component among the participants in anti-Jewish violence." Andrii Usach also pointed out the inconsistency of the scene in which an officer in a Polish uniform shoots a Jew - only Germans killed with firearms in Lviv in those days.

We Were the Lucky Ones

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We Were the Lucky Ones

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