The horror is sanitised from this Hallmark Holocaust
THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ
Sky Atlantic
When the late Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, saw Holocaust, the first major television production about the fate of Jews during World War II (starring a young Meryl Streep, incidentally) he dismissed it as mere “soap opera”. The sheer mind-bending horror of the Nazi camps could not be reflected in a television drama, he said. The Holocaust was “the ultimate mystery, the ultimate event, never to be comprehended or transmitted”.
Thirty years of “never forget” later it feels as though his words have almost wilfully been forgotten. The Holocaust has become an endless font of entertainment, some of it thoughtful and challenging – like Jonathan Glazer’s recent Oscar winner, The Zone of Interest – and some of it questionable.
The Auschwitz museum would probably put The Tattooist of Auschwitz in the latter category. When the book became a runaway bestseller in 2018, the museum criticised various historical inaccuracies, and “exaggerations” in the novel – a love story, written by Heather Morris and based on the recollections of a survivor of the camp, Lale Sokolov, whom she had gotten to know in Australia.
Morris defended herself in an interview with the Sunday Independent in which she said: “I’m not telling the story of the Holocaust, I’m telling a Holocaust story. And if history and memory don’t always walk side by side, I’m going with the memory of the person telling me their story”.
Nonetheless, Tali ShalomEzer, director and co-executive producer of the new TV series, based on the novel, has taken pains to address some of the criticisms, for instance changing the camp registration number of Lale’s lover, Gita, to what it was (and what she herself confirmed before her death), rather than what Lale recalled.
This might somewhat placate historians but you can’t help feeling that Wiesel would still be horrified. This is a Hallmark Holocaust, reimagined like a serialised Lifetime movie, with beautiful actors pouting and emoting in striped pyjamas.
Before we get to them we meet a matronly Morris (Melanie Lynskey) who plops herself in front of the aged Lale (Harvey Keitel), announces she’s just completed a writing course and tells him she wants to write his story. In a gutteral Slovakian accent he begins to tell her of being deported to Poland in
1942 and ending up at the factory-like Nazi concentration camp where the Jews of Europe would be worked to death and murdered on an industrial scale. Lale must have developed his accent after the war, because in these recollections the young version of him (played by Jonah Hauer-King) speaks in an English accent, as do many of the Jewish prisoners.
The guards also speak English but with campy German accents. These details make the series feel like something from a bygone era, and needlessly rob the action of any feeling of authenticity – people can and will read subtitles.
The love story between Gita and Lale plays out through stolen moments and longing glances across the barbed wire of the wartime hellscape, and the humiliations heaped upon them by ruthless guards.
Interspersed with these recollections, we flash back to the present day, and Lale’s chats with Morris, in a cosy sitting room in which the ghosts of the past are rendered as figures in the room – played by the actors from the memory sequences. Every so often a gaunt figure – meant to represent one of the anonymous millions destined for the gas chamber – stares plaintively out at the viewer.
This is a type of dramatic replication of what the Auschwitz museum itself does – it daily posts photos and biographies on Twitter of those who met their fate in this way – but in this context, with the victims, still not named, and played by actors, it seems hopelessly inadequate and cheesily exploitative.
Maybe the man’s darkest night really is beyond the reach of serialised drama. Or maybe we just need a better drama than this.