Sumith Prasad
In the fourth episode of Hulu’s historical series ‘We Were the Lucky Ones,’ Addy Kurc gets engaged to Elisabeth AKA Eliska without a ring. He expresses his love for her and how much she means to him when they are facing death alike. Eliska doesn’t take long to reveal her feelings for him as well. Even though her mother Madame Lowbeer doesn’t approve of her daughter’s new relationship and companion, Eliska and Addy get together. In real life, their togetherness didn’t last long. After they arrived in Rio de Janeiro, their lives changed significantly and their separation contributed to the same considerably!
Addy and Eliska’s Separation
Addy and Eliska got together while they were traveling to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from Marseille, France, on a ship called Alsina. Her mother, as the series depicts, was against the couple’s relationship. Still, he tried to garner the approval of “la Grande Dame,” as Eliska called her, with determination. According to Eliska, he didn’t give up his efforts despite her mother being aloof. Addy and Eliska’s journey to Rio wasn’t smooth. They were detailed in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, for several months and Addy’s presence gave Eliska and others relief. “There were many occasions when his [Addy’s] optimism, his faith in life’s goodness, kept the rest of us at bay of despair,” she told Georgia Hunter, who wrote the source novel of the same name, as per the author’s website.
Addy and Eliska’s relationship started to disintegrate after they arrived in Brazil. In Hunter’s novel, Addy’s separation from his family affected their relationship. “Eliska had grown despondent when Addy told her how preoccupied he was, how he could think of nothing but his family,” reads the book. Meanwhile, his work took him away to Minas Gerais, which is located over 500 km from Rio. Once he returned from the region, Addy and Eliska broke up as a couple. “They weren’t meant to be married, they agreed. It wasn’t easy—neither of them wanted to be alone, nor did they want to be seen as people who would voluntarily give up, even though they both knew that giving up, in this case, was for the best,” reads Hunter’s book.
When Hunter met Eliska, the author asked her why she didn’t marry Addy, the former’s grandfather. “Oh, we had our fun. Plenty of it. But your grandfather and I, we were too much alike. If we’d gotten married, there would have been fireworks!” Eliska told the writer. While Hunter was researching for the novel, Eliska was eighty-eight and living in a retirement community in North Carolina. She opened a window into Addy’s life as a young composer to Hunter, which was significant for the author to write the novel. Hunter remembered Eliska’s help in her book.
“Thank you as well to Eliska, who opened a window into what it was like to be a refugee in those harrowing first months of 1940, and whose description of my young grandfather made her blue eyes, even at eighty-eight, sparkle,” Hunter wrote in ‘We Were the Lucky Ones.’ After separating from Eliska, Addy got together with Caroline, an American woman who was working in the United States embassy in Rio. “When Addy met the beautiful, serene Caroline, we both knew she was to be his mainstay and love for the rest of his life,” Eliska told Hunter about her ex-fiancé’s wife.
A few years after breaking up with Eliska, Addy moved to Massachusetts with Caroline and their daughter Kathleen. The state became their new home and the couple eventually welcomed Hunter’s mother Isabelle and Timothy.
