Finding true love amidst the horrors and human suffering at Auschwitz
Most work here will be to the death -- freedom an unattainable dream
THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ Heather Morris Loot.co.za (R239) Zaffre
REVIEWER: JENNIFER CROCKER
THE author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz is Heather Morris. She is not Jewish and never lost any family members in the concentration camps of World War II, but she did meet Lale Sokolov while working at a large public hospital in Melbourne and writing screenplays in her spare time.
She was introduced to Lale as an elderly man “with a story she might want to hear”. That story forms the basis of her novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Lale was forced to leave Slovakia believing that by arriving for one of the transport trains his family would be safe. We meet him as the cattle train wends its way to Auschwitz.
It rapidly becomes clear to Lale and his companions that there is no redemption to be found in work at the camp and that the sign that still stands sentinel over the entrance to Auschwitz “Arbeit macht frei” is a cruel irony. Most work here will be to the death, and freedom becomes an unattainable dream for the majority of the inhabitants of the camp.
Lale determines to do what he must to survive, and you have to bear in mind he is only 18 years old and fit.
He is given the job of tattooing the notorious numbers on to new inhabitants when they arrive at Auschwitz.
It’s partially because he is fluent in a number of languages, including German, that he is given the job (which horrifies him on a daily basis), although he is somewhat under the protection of the SS. It also leads him to meeting Gita, the young woman he will fall in love with.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is told in a somewhat detached style. The horror and the human suffering are recorded, but sometimes I was left with the feeling that they were merely being put into the narrative to establish time and place.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.
The older, widowed Lale, now living in New Zealand, wanted to tell his particular story – and to the extent that everyone owns their story he has, or rather he had, as he has since died – the right to tell his story as he saw fit.
It’s a book of quiet desperation and the redemptive power of love in the more unloving of circumstances.
The story has another function, which is to reflect on those inmates of concentration camps who became kapos, or worked in clerical jobs for the SS.
It’s easy for us, so many years later, to condemn those who even in the smallest least offensive way could be seen to benefit from relationships formed with their captors, but through the story of Lale and Gita it becomes clearer that without hindsight there was no way for them to place the small acts of collaboration that enabled them to get medicine for the sick in their blocks, or to provide extra food for the starving.
This is not a sweeping book about the horror of the Holocaust, but a human story that contributes to the overall canon of the evil that stalked and still stalks the world today.
A sobering read, told with integrity and gentleness.