Auschwitz Memorial slams Amazon's Hunters as "disrespectful and dangerous"

Variety

The Auschwitz Memorial's official Twitter account called out a violent chess scene depicted in the Nazi-hunting drama's opening credits and in the first episode as “dangerous foolishness” and a “caricature.” The scene shows a Jewish chess master held captive and forced to play chess where the pieces are represented by fellow prisoners, according to Variety. A person is killed whenever the chess player loses a piece. “Auschwitz was full of horrible pain & suffering documented in the accounts of survivors. Inventing a fake game of human chess for @huntersonprime is not only a dangerous foolishness & caricature," the Auschwitz Memorial account tweeted. "It also welcomes future deniers. We honor the victims by preserving factual accuracy." In response, Hunters creator David Weil issued a lengthy statement pointing out that he had visited Auschwitz and is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. "While Hunters is a dramatic narrative series, with largely fictional characters, it is inspired by true events," he wrote. "But it is not documentary. And it was never purported to be. In creating this series it was most important for me to consider what I believe to be the ultimate question and challenge of telling a story about the Holocaust: how do I do so without borrowing from a real person’s specific life or experience? It was for this reason that I made the decision that all of the concentration camp prisoners (and survivors) in the series would be given tattoos above the number 202,499. 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. That was the responsibility that weighed on me every night and every morning for years, while writing, producing, editing this show. It is the thing I go to sleep thinking about and the thing I wake up working to honor."