Strange as it may sound, Holocaust tourism is a real thing. About 15 years ago, I was going to Berlin on business and I thought I would spend a few days afterward to go visit my grandparents’ hometown in southern Poland. As it’s located not too far from Auschwitz-Birkenau, I thought I would visit the concentration camps too, as I had never been there. I contacted my brother who lives less than four hours away from Poland by plane to see if he wanted to join me on this pilgrimage of sorts but he wasn’t interested. He only likes looking forward, not backward. I, however, take a different approach. If you don’t know where you came from, how do you know where you’re going? My grandparents, when they did speak of the “Old Country”, as they called it, which wasn’t very often, it was only in the most disparaging of terms. They left there in the 1920s, well before the horrors of the Holocaust began, but they could already see the writing on the wall. Most of their family members, however, were less visionary or perhaps less risk-taking, and they perished in the gas chambers of Treblinka in 1942. Except for my great-grandmother who was executed by a Nazi soldier in her yard for not leaving her home when the deportation order came, only two cousins who were neither too young nor too old to be of use to the Nazis were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where one later died. Is it any wonder then that my grandparents spoke so badly of the place? The trauma of knowing that they lived in safety and security while their family died so tragically was something they never got over. I’m sure some of their pain filtered down to my mother and, who knows, maybe it affected my brother and me, the third generation, in some way too.

In A REAL PAIN, following the death of their grandmother, David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg, ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP) decides to visit Poland to see where she had lived before the Holocaust. He invites along his first cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin, TV’s SUCCESSION), but the two guys who were joined at the hip as children couldn’t be more different as adults. David is married with a young son and has a successful career in digital advertising while Benji is a bit of a lost soul, living in his parents’ basement without any direction in his life. David is uptight and suffers from anxiety; Benji is exuberant but he suffers from bouts of depression, the most recent of which seems to have been triggered from their grandmother’s passing. The pair manages, though, to make it to Poland where they join a tour of Jews who all have their own reasons for taking such a trip.

While I’m not a Jesse Eisenberg fan, I was very impressed with both his writing and his direction on this film. Eisenberg has said in interviews that he wrote the story as an examination into his own life of assimilation and privilege in America. As the last few Holocaust survivors die out, and two passed away in the past week alone, it becomes harder for the younger generations to understand both the horrible things that people are capable of doing to each other and the conditions that allow such evil to flourish. While David takes a clinical approach to their trip, Benji feels the magnitude of loss that their grandmother must have incurred. Interestingly, at the group’s visit to the concentration camp at Majdanek, Benji, rather bluntly, tells their tour guide to just shut up and allow them all to be in the moment. I had a Benji moment when I visited Birkenau. As our tour guide was rambling on, I walked away and explored the camp on my own. I needed the quiet to process what I was seeing.

A REAL PAIN is not all doom and gloom though. It also has some laugh-out-loud moments and the banter between David and Benji, which I sense was mostly unscripted, is fun to watch. Not surprisingly, Culkin’s performance earned him a Golden Globe yesterday and while winning a Globe is no guarantee that it will translate into an Oscar win much less a nomination, it does improve his chances of more well-deserved awards to come.

A REAL PAIN is available for purchase now on Amazon Prime Video. It will begin streaming on Hulu in the US on January 16th. There’s no word yet on when it will go to Disney+ in Hong Kong (we don’t have Hulu here) but I suspect it will be very soon if not the same day. You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate A REAL PAIN but it couldn’t hurt.

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