Zone of interest

Harvey Keitel talks about his moving role in The Tattooist of Auschwitz

One of the most celebrated US actors, Harvey Keitel came to prominence in the 1970s through a series of movies directed by his friend and fellow New Yorker, Martin Scorsese. His career since has included many impressive dramas, including Reservoir Dogs (1992), The Piano (1993), Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Irishman (2019). In this new six-part series, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Keitel plays the eponymous concentration camp survivor, Lali Sokolov, nally nding the courage to tell his story. He tells Insider how he got involved in the project.

Had you read or were you aware of The Tattooist of Auschwitz when you were approached to play modern day Lali?

I had heard of it and came to reading it after I was asked to play the part. As strange as it might sound, I felt it was in the wind that Heather Morris’ book and I were meant to come together.

What was your initial response to being o ered the role?

My initial reaction was to bear witness. It’s our duty to condemn the barbarism and inhumanity in icted on Jews, Roma and Sinti, political dissidents, and any of the communities that were persecuted by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

What kind of research did you do for the project?

I read texts by Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl. There are so many important and valuable books. There were many videos of testimony by former prisoners of Auschwitz. There are some video interviews of Lali online. I watched everything I could get my hands on. I met a wonderfully spirited woman – not unlike Lali and Gita – named Celina Karp Biniaz, a “Schindler’s List” survivor, who was at a friend’s gathering to share her experiences with younger generations. There is also a beautiful short documentary by Alain Resnais called Night and Fog, which is a must-see.

My initial reaction was to bear witness. I watched everything I could get my hands on

Why do you think it’s important to keep these stories alive?

In Auschwitz, they would have a band playing beautiful music to greet the arrivals of new prisoners – often children, women, even pregnant women, and men – as they disembarked the cattle cars to their nal destination: Auschwitz. Beautiful music to serenade them as they were led to the gas chambers, to their deaths. The horror. Six million Jews were murdered. Lali and Gita is just one story. They had to carry all they’d seen, they had to make choices no one should be forced into making. The circumstances were inhumane, unfathomable to us now. It’s a horror movie, but it really happened. Lali and Gita’s love for each other miraculously led to their survival. Yes, they were lucky, but they had to sacri ce things, too. They had to live with those demons they encountered on their way to their survival for the rest of their lives. In that respect, no one survived Auschwitz.