Amazon Prime released their new show Hunters, starring Al Pacino, February 21st. The show is set during the 70s and focuses on a group of Nazi Hunters trying to hunt down Nazis that escaped to America after the war.
While the subject matter is quite serious, the show is heavily stylized and often attempts a sort of comic book feel. This is shown through the main character, Jonah, who is obsessed with comic books and often sees the events happening as if he is in one of his comic books.
The scene of note depicts Holocaust prisoners as living chess pieces.
Something worth noting is the opening sequence which depicts all the characters as chess pieces as they move about a chess board. This is explained in the first episode when Al Panico’s character, Meyer, explains a story from his days in the concentration camps where a particularly cruel Nazi forced the prisoners to reenact a chess game with the prisoners as players.
The scene shows the prisoners split into two groups: naked prisoners representing the white pieces and clothed prisoners representing the black pieces. Every time a piece was “captured” the Nazi would make the prisoner who captured the piece kill that prisoner.
This scene was not met with approval by The Auschwitz Memorial.
This scene came under fire by The Auschwitz Memorial. The Auschwitz Memorial is a memorial that focuses on documenting the horrors that occurred in Auschwitz in order to prevent any future naysayers. The Auschwitz Memorial tweeted their disapproval of the scene saying:
“Auschwitz was full of horrible pain and suffering documented in the accounts of the survivors. Inventing a fake game of chess for @huntersonprime is not only dangerous foolishness & caricature. It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy”Twitter
The creator of the show, David Weil, responded to this in a statement where he argued that this scene represented a “representational truth” that will give the audience access to the “emotional reality” of the Holocaust. There has often been a debate about whether or not Holocaust stories should fictionalized or documentary. Hunters plays with this idea by heavily fictionalizing concentration camps and the Holocaust while still drawing from real experiences.
Hunters is currently available to stream on Amazon Prime.
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