BLOODY REVENGE
Pacino stars as vigilante Nazi hunter in first regular small screen role
Of all the stories David Weil’s grandmother told him about the Unterluss concentration camp, it was the one about the potato peels that made the deepest impression.
Weil was five or six, his grandmother was visiting his parents in New York and young David had turned his nose up at some food on his plate.
“You must eat everything,” Sara Weil- Grossman said firmly in a Polish accent that had barely changed during her five decades in America. “It is a sin not to finish your meal.”
And then she told him how she had learnt that lesson.
“She talked about starvation in the camps and how she was known as the Garbage Queen of Unterluss,” says Weil, now 31 and among the hottest young screenwriters in Hollywood.
“She would take potato peels from the trash cans and store them and give them to other people. It was dangerous, she could have been shot for doing it, but she risked her life so people could eat.”
The story planted a seed in Weil’s mind that grew fresh shoots each time he heard a new horror about the Holocaust. It’s now set to bloom in the form of an extraordinary new 10-part drama on Amazon.
Starring Al Pacino in his first regular TV role, Hunters revolves around a gang of vigilantes in 1970s New York who discover former Nazis in the U.S. and proceed to assassinate them in bloody and furious fashion.
“Holocaust denial has metastasized throughout the world in the last 10 years,” Weil says. “The number of people who have never heard of the Holocaust or who have heard of it but think it didn’t happen is shocking. The point of this series is to carry on my grandmother’s story and teach people the truth.”
In person, Weil is unfailingly polite. But his solicitous manner disguises deep emotions. The Nazis in his show are so evil you find yourself willing them to die as slowly and painfully as possible. (In one flashback, an Auschwitz guard arms 32 prisoners with switchblades and forces them to play a game of human chess in which each inmate must kill their opponent.)
The Hunters of the title are a crew of highly skilled operatives outraged that these monsters survived the war and have never faced justice for their crimes.
Pacino plays the gang’s leader, Meyer Offerman. “Before Jews even existed, hatred and slaughter waited for us,” he tells the show’s hero, Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman), a 20-year-old comic store worker whose grandmother, we learn, founded the Hunters with Meyer and is killed by the aforementioned Auschwitz guard in her New York home.
“For thousands of years, from Masada to Munich, we’ve been massacred. We survived the war, we survived the greatest mass eradication in modern history and we arrive home to find that the people who did this to us, they’re our neighbours. So what should we do? Shake hands? Turn a blind eye? Forget? No. We must instil fear, send the message, let them know: not again, no more.”
Was Weil trying to make viewers angry when he wrote the passage?
“Absolutely,” he says. “It really is about the inability of the powerless to get justice.”
As Meyer reminds Jonah, only 12 Nazis were executed at Nuremberg. And although countless Nazis fled to South America, many others went to the U.S., not least the Nazi rocket scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who were brought in to help win both the Cold War and the Space Race.
“There is a stadium in Alabama named after Wernher von Braun, who will be a character in our series,” says Weil. “He was a Nazi and yet we deify this man. He was on TV with Walt Disney, there is a NASA award in his name.
“There are still these individuals who people really don’t know about, or, if they do, maybe don’t care about. But to me it’s black and white. It’s really quite simple: a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi.”
Weil wanted the Jews in his show to be strong, mighty and “cool.” Thus, Jonah is given a preternatural ability to divine patterns and crack codes. Wisecracking Nazi hunter Lonny Flash (Josh Radnor) is “a master of disguise” and old-timers Mindy and Murray Markowitz (Carol Kane and Saul Rubinek) are elite weapon makers.
“The show’s themes are not specific to the Jewish plight,” says co-writer Nikki Toscano. “They apply to other groups who have been persecuted and denied justice.”
As one of the Nazis remarks: “Offer up a black man to blame and you can get away with anything in America.”
The show is obviously inspired by real-life “hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, who brought more than 1,000 Nazis to justice, including Adolf Eichmann — the key difference being that the Hunters don’t hand over their targets to the authorities, but devise gruesome ways to kill them.
Meyer, who has lost all faith in the justice system, believes it’s pointless to involve the authorities in their mission, but Jonah cannot countenance the vigilantism.
“We ask the question: Is this justice or is this vengeance?” says Toscano. “When you’re hunting monsters, do you become the monster that you’re hunting?
The parallels with the War on Terror and America’s extrajudicial drone strikes are obvious. Weil and Toscano believe this only makes Hunters that much more compelling and important.