‘I’m carrying on my grandmother’s story’

The creator of Al Pacino’s first television series tells Paul Kendall how it was inspired by the horrors of the Holocaust

2020-02-15 -

Of all the stories David Weil’s grandmother told him about life in the Unterlüss 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’ home in Long Island, New York, and young David had turned his nose up at some inoffensive item of 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

Unterlüss,” 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 in her bunk. It was dangerous, she could have been shot for doing it, but she risked her life so people could eat. Even though all she was giving them was scraps.”

The story planted a seed in Weil’s mind that grew fresh shoots each time he heard a new horror about the Holocaust – from his grandmother or from other survivors – and that is 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 Seventies New York who discover a network of former Nazis living in America and proceed to assassinate them in bloody and furious fashion.

“Holocaust denial has metastasised throughout the world in the last 10 years,” says Weil. “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, whose parents are observant Jews, cuts a wellgroomed, wholesome figure; a buoyant quiff swaying above blue eyes. He is unfailingly polite and furrows his brow in concentration whenever anyone talks to him, as if they are King Solomon imparting words of divine wisdom.

But his solicitous manner disguises deep emotions. Weil’s soul burns with a righteous indignation that infuses Hunters from the very first frame. The

Nazis in the 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 every time a “piece” is taken). The old Nuremberg defence about “just following orders” is not given the time of day.

The Hunters of the title are a crew of highly-skilled operatives – assembled in the fashion of Ocean’s Eleven – outraged on behalf of the whole Jewish race that these monsters survived the war and have never faced justice for the crimes they committed.

Pacino – who joined the cast after meeting Weil, Nikki Toscano, his experienced co-writer, and the show’s executive producer Jordan Peele (director of the Oscarwinning film Get Out) – 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 when he realises she has uncovered his secret.

“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 instill fear, send the message, let them know: not again, no more.”

It is the standout passage in a 90-minute pilot that is full of blistering dialogue, delivered by 79-year-old Pacino in a flawless Eastern European accent. Was

Weil trying to make viewers angry when he wrote it?

“Absolutely,” he says. “It really is about the inability of the powerless to get justice, and the urge among these people to get power in other ways.” As Meyer reminds Jonah, only 12 Nazis were executed at Nuremberg. And although it is well known that countless members of the Third Reich fled to South America, many others went to the United States, not least the Nazi rocket scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who were brought in by President Truman to work for

EDWARD G ROBINSON IN THE STRANGER (1946)

Orson Welles directed and stars in this problematic post-war noir as a Nazi-turned-teacher in small-town America. Robinson hounds him for the UN War Crimes Commission.

LAURENCE OLIVIER IN THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978)

After Marathon Man, Olivier switched sides for this Ira Levin adaptation – and got another Oscar nomination – as an ageing Jewish agent based on Simon Wiesenthal.

JAN TŘÍSKA IN APT PUPIL (1998)

Ian McKellen stars as a Nazi war criminal but Czech actor Tříska makes a more indelible impression as his nemesis. He’s tipped off when his quarry is hospitalised next to a death camp survivor. the military, in the hope that they would give America an advantage in 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. You know, ‘He was a Nazi, but he got us to the Moon.’ There is always that kind of discussion, but to me it’s blackand-white, it’s really quite simple: a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi. So I think this show will help to shed light on that.”

The series is also an unapologetic and fantastical exercise in wish fulfilment. Just as the Jewish creators of Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were attracted to the idea of a man with the power to vanquish evil, so 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. Other minority groups are also present in the crew: an African-American “counterfeiter and crime scene cleaner” and a Japanese-American soldier.

“The show’s themes are not specific to the Jewish plight,” says co-writer Toscano. “They apply to other groups who have been persecuted and denied justice.” As one of the Nazis remarks in the first episode: “Offer up a black man to blame and you can get away with anything in America.”

Even so, the show is obviously inspired by the work of real-life “hunter” Simon Wiesenthal, who brought more than 1,000 Nazis to justice, and his famous joint operation with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, to capture Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960 – the key difference being that the Hunters do not hand over their targets to the authorities once they have found them, but instead devise imaginative and gruesome ways to kill them that reflect the crimes they have committed. It is here that the show’s moral certitude falters. While Meyer, a Holocaust survivor who has lost all faith in the American justice system, believes it is pointless to involve the authorities in their “holy” mission, Jonah cannot countenance the Hunters’ 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?

Must you sacrifice your morality, your soul, in order to right certain wrongs?”

Even Mossad, for all its brazen disregard of Argentina’s sovereignty, put Eichmann on trial once he was back in Israel (a trial that, by examining the crimes of the former SS Obersturmbannführer in forensic detail, did more than any other single event to bring the atrocities of the Holocaust to the attention of the world).

The parallels with the War on Terror and America’s extrajudicial drone strikes which, most recently, claimed the life of the Iranian military commander Qassim Soleimani in Iraq, are obvious.

Weil and Toscano believe this topicality only makes Hunters more compelling.

“Old films [about the Holocaust] lose their urgency,” says Weil. “You need storytellers and filmmakers shaping stories that are of the moment, of the time, because the moment we stop remembering, history will repeat itself.”

Of course, to some, the Holocaust has never gone away; there are still hundreds of books on the subject published every year. But they are, in the main, preaching to the converted, Weil says. Hunters has been designed to appeal to the social media generation who have shown themselves so susceptible to fake news.

“Even at Harvard there were jokes about Jews and ovens,” he says. “Ignorance is ubiquitous.”

Would he go so far as to say Hunters is “necessary”?

“Necessary?” he says. “It’s mandatory.”