*Ed note: Kim Masters, host of The Business is today's guest writer.

Hi there,

I first heard about Jesse Eisenberg’s film, A Real Pain, when it was getting positive buzz at film festivals. I don’t read reviews before I see a film. I try to get a sense of whether something is worth seeing, but I definitely don’t want a synopsis of the plot. I want to approach the film with as blank a slate as possible, so I actually go back and read reviews after I’ve done my own viewing.

I was well predisposed to A Real Pain, though, just because I thought it would have some humor and because of Kieran Culkin, who was so great in Succession and who was an interesting and genial guest on The Business. But before I saw A Real Pain, I heard something that gave me pause. I knew the premise of the film: Two cousins go to Poland to visit the hometown of their late grandmother, who had escaped the Nazis. But I heard that the characters go on a tour of Majdanek, a concentration camp just a couple of miles from Lublin, where the Nazis killed tens of thousands of people. Among them were my grandparents, Saloman and Sidonia Eberstark, who had lived with their three little girls in a small village in what was then Czechoslovakia.

I’ve never felt that I could get through a tour of a death camp. Although my mother never talked about what had happened to her parents when I was a child, somehow we all knew that it was something too terrible to discuss. (My mother and her sisters had escaped on a kindertransport arranged by the great Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved more than 660 children. He was beautifully portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the 2023 film, One Life.)

As I grew up, I found that I was instantly unhinged by any depiction of concentration camps in a film. In college, I went to see The Pawnbroker on campus and found that I had to leave the instant I saw those infamous Auschwitz gates. I’ve never watched the whole film and I’ve avoided several others depicting the camps. Intergenerational trauma is real. I used to wonder and still do: Did they kill my grandparents right away? Did they force one or both of them into slave labor? How were they killed? Bullets, starvation, disease, gas…?

But if I wanted to have Jesse Eisenberg on The Business, and I did, I would have to watch A Real Pain. When we book guests, we always watch their work. (Exception: As producer Jason Blum knows, I’m very squeamish about horror and though he’s been on the show more than once, I skip some of those movies. Exception to the exception: I watched and loved Get Out.)

So I braced myself when I saw A Real Pain, waiting for the visit to Majdanek. But to my surprise, as the tour began and I caught my first glimpse of the place, I found myself curious to see more. Majdanek is one of the best-preserved camps, as it happens, and I thought this might be the best or really the only way for me to look at that hellish place — the barracks, the gas chambers, the crematoria... And I felt some gratitude to Jesse, whom I had not yet met. 

Toward the end of that sequence, there was a brief shot of the shoes that had been worn by victims of the Nazis — thousands of shoes. And it struck me: Any of those shoes could have belonged to my grandmother. Given the industrial pace of killings in the camp, it wasn’t likely. But it wasn’t impossible. The image haunted me. 

Still, I felt almost imperative to book Jesse on the show. I wanted to tell him what the film meant to me. We didn’t get an immediate yes so eventually I called a contact at Disney (the parent of Searchlight Pictures, which released the movie in the US) and explained why I wanted so much to do the interview. Within a few days, I was sitting with Jesse in the studio. 

We talked for a while before I introduced the subject I most wanted to discuss. I found myself saying, “Now we get to the encounter-session part of the interview.” I hadn’t planned that at all. I wondered whether any of the publicists for the film had told him that I was basically lying in wait to talk about Majdanek. No one had. When I told him why the scenes of the camp had been so meaningful to me, he looked surprised — and then very genuinely offered his sympathy. As one who knew about the weight of it all from experience.

We talked about my perspective as a child of Holocaust survivors and his as a grandchild. If you haven’t listened to that show, you can find it here. I’m happy to say that many listeners wrote to say how much the conversation moved them. For me, it was obviously one of the most special interviews I have ever done for the show.

At the end, Jesse told me something that surprised me: He had done a lot of press for the film but this was the first interview in which he had been asked about Majdanek. I find that discouraging, as it feels particularly relevant today. But I hope that people who have seen the film took in its message about how very possible it is for a country or a continent to slide into unthinkable inhumanity.

Jesse has already won awards, including a BAFTA, for best screenplay. If he should happen to win the Oscar for his script, I can’t help but hope that a few Academy voters watched A Real Pain and then voted for the movie after hearing Jesse on my show. 

Kim Masters
Host of KCRW's The Business 

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