Harlan Coben's YA Series 'Shelter' Tackles Ghosts of the Holocaust

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 22, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 22, 2023 |

I am a sucker for a Harlan Coben series, formulaic murder-mysteries with a comfortingly sterile tone. They often star actors like Michael C. Hall, Cush Jumbo, Hugh Bonneville, or Richard Armitage, who can play characters with little personality and act as vessels for plot. Coben’s characters are almost always 100 percent plot-driven. His stories are also flexible — and nondescript — enough to work in nearly any locale or language.

Coben’s series typically screen on Netflix through a deal with the streamer, but the deal did not include the Myron Bolitar series or its YA spin-off focused on Mickey Bolitar, which is how Shelter found its way to Prime Video. Shelter is not terribly different in tone from his other series, except that its leads are teens, which makes it a more teen-friendly show, and it also has a supernatural element. It’s a little spooky, but it’s not horror.

Jaden Michael plays Mickey Bolitar, a high-school student and star basketball player who is forced to move in with his aunt, Shira (the always reliable Constance Zimmer) after his father is killed in a car accident that also leaves his mother institutionalized. Despite his athletic ability, Mickey rejects the basketball jocks and befriends two outcasts: a dorky Harry Potter-looking guy they call Spoon (Adrian Greensmith) and gothy lesbian Ema, played by Abby Corrigan. Mickey also hits it off with another new student, Ashley (Samantha Bugliaro), who mysteriously disappears after the first day of school.

Ashley is not the only kid who has disappeared from this town in New Jersey, and the disappearances seem to have a mysterious link to Mickey’s father and a creepy house where urban legend has it a Bat Lady (Tovah Feldshuh) lives.

Slight spoilers (through episode 3) here: The Bat Lady, it turns out, is Lizzy Sobek, who is described in the series as a girl who helped hide Jewish children, including Anne Frank, during the Holocaust. Lizzy Sobek is not a real person, but she is likely based loosely on Irene Sendler. Sendler was a social worker during World War II who disguised herself as an infection control nurse who—along with her conspirators—saved over 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.

Unlike Sendler, who helped to save 2,500 children from Warsaw, Lizzy Sobek saved 50 kids on a train headed to Auschwitz (there were also magical butterflies who led those children to Lizzy). Alas, only 6 of the 50 kids escaped, while the others were killed and tortured by the Butcher of Łódź, who is based on a real historical figure, Hans Biebow. He was the Nazi liaison for the Łódź Ghetto and was personally involved in the killing, torture, and rape of Jews. More than that, he was instrumental in the forced labor programs that exploited Jews (forced labor programs that Greg Gutfield suggested saved the lives of “useful” Jews). The way he managed the Łódź Ghetto—the second-largest ghetto established by the Nazis—led to tens of thousands of inhumane deaths.

Somehow, we are led to believe in Shelter, the Butcher of Łódź is not only still alive but also still young and responsible for the disappearances of all these children in New Jersey. (The real Butcher of Łódź was tried and executed for war crimes in 1947).

It’s a real head-scratcher: Is the Bat Lady really Lizzy Sobek, and is the Butcher of Łódź still alive and killing children? It all makes for decent late-summer television. The episodes premiered this week on Prime Video, although Coben’s series really are better suited to the binge model because it’s hard to hold the mostly forgettable details of his series in our minds for a week between episodes. It makes for adequately entertaining television all the same.