"I laugh," says Mila, the Kurc least likely to. "Maybe the jokes should be funny."

"And no Jewish eyes. If we look as sad as we feel, we may as well just announce ourselves."

Each episode is titled for a location — Radom, Warsaw and Siberia, but also Casablanca, Monte Cassino and Rio de Janeiro. The variety of locations, the alternation of tone and predicaments as the series skips between threads, keeps it from becoming too emotionally, too existentially wearing. (They do want you to last until the end.) There are moments of respite, occasions for humor and even romance. The death camps are spoken of, but they're elsewhere. Violence takes place mostly offscreen, and when it does hit close to home, it's all the more disturbing.

Even the moderately well-informed viewer is bound to learn a few things, but "We Were the Lucky Ones" isn't a history lesson. It's a human story, of husbands and wives, parents and children, friends and lovers — a motion picture, to be sure, with a score in an Eastern European key, and montages, and one of those shots where the camera circles a kissing couple. Its purpose, as television, is to make you feel, for the characters and by extension for a people — to experience, such as might be possible, the stress of privation, the threat of discovery, and the tragedy of having to deny one's identity in order to live. It's a dark journey, but light comes in at the end. What's lost may be found.

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'WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES'

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Hulu

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