'Hunters' Episode 3: Jonah’s dilemma about Meyer’s mission and his grandma’s past leads him to walk away
Spoiler alert for 'Hunters' Episode 3
The horrors of the holocaust between 1941-45 that Ruth Heidelbaum (Jeannie Berlin) lived through was never a topic of discussion in the Heidelbaum household. In fact, in the first episode when Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino) tells Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) about how a Jewish chess player was tortured, it's something that he had never heard from his grandmother. Ruth wanted to keep her grandson away from it all and that included the Hunters. A surprised Meyer asked Jonah if he had never heard such stories from his grandmother before to which Jonah responds that only rich people had the privilege of sharing tales from the past. This response encompasses Jonah's connection to the horrors that his grandmother and Meyer had lived through.
He did not know much and he wasn't interested because the experiences didn't concern him, or influence his life in any manner. Then, of course, he decided to join the Hunters to know more about his grandmother. It was initially a curiosity; led on by how Meyer was able to kill the man who shot Jonah's grandmother, while the cops were not even interested in finding out the real reason why she was shot. They copped it up to a burglary gone wrong. For someone who is grieving a loss of the only surviving member of his family; being a part of a Nazi-hunting group like Hunters was a welcome distraction. Then he saw them torture Karl Holstedder, a Nazi radio engineer for information about what he was broadcasting from his secret room and things escalated too soon.
He did not relate to the fights that the Hunters were fighting. He was unable to stomach the horror of watching someone being tortured and then being killed and this manifested into a trauma that stayed with Jonah until he read one of Ruth's diary entries. It was about how she was taken to the concentration camp after being saved by Meyer. She recalled how women were made to sit naked in a room as their hair was chopped short; the people at the camp doing everything to erase the identities of the Jews at the camp. The ringing in his ears that hadn't stopped since he ran away from Holstedder's body stopped ringing after he read this wrenching entry. It seemed as if by reading the letter, Jonah reminded himself that Holstedder deserved what he got but he wasn't entirely convinced.
So when Meyer tries to check up on how Jonah's feeling, he tells Meyer that he wants out. He tells Meyer that what the Hunters do is not something that he can accept and if he wants to keep Jonah safe; something that Meyer has been repeatedly saying since the beginning, it's time to let him go. Meyer doesn't push Jonah and leaves, however, once you ally yourself with a cause such as the one that the Hunters push for, there are footprints that you leave behind and are unaware of.
Jonah has left one such link to himself at the toy shop owned by Richter; the Nazi who shot his grandmother. He left his jacket behind in the shop with a label of his name on the jacket. This gives Travis (Greg Austin), the man who works for The Colonel who is spearheading the Fourth Reich a lead. He heads to Jonah's house, and when he doesn't find Jonah there, he heads over the comic store that Jonah worked at. Only, instead of Jonah, Travis finds Jonah's best friend Arthur (Caleb Emery) at the counter. Arthur doesn't betray his friend and even tries to leave after attacking Travis but gets shot in the back. It is this incident that really gives Jonah an inkling of what living the horrors of camps would have been like.
Watch 'Hunters' Episode 4 on Amazon Prime Video from February 21.