A love that survived AUSCHWITZ
The incredible story of the death camp inmate who tattooed numbers on other prisoners – and how he came to marry a fellow survivor
THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ Thursday, Sky Atlantic, 9pm
Making a drama about Auschwitz is an extraordinarily daunting task. It needs to convey both the horror of the Nazi concentration camp but also have enough humanity to ensure that people don’t simply switch off, because that’s a huge part of why we make dramas about awful historical events – to remind us not to repeat them.
The Tattooist Of Auschwitz has a running start here, based as it is on Heather Morris’s hugely successful book of the same name, which came from interviews the New Zealander conducted with Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew who survived the camp partly due to the job he took – tattooing numbers on his fellow prisoners.
Morris’s book has sold more than 12 million copies and, while it has attracted claims of factual inconsistency and exaggeration, the way it conveys the humanity at the core of the story is what makes it effective.
‘This is a love story,’ is what the elder Sokolov (Harvey Keitel) tells Morris (Melanie Lynskey) as she sits down to talk to him, in interviews that frame the flashbacks to the younger Lale (Jonah Hauer-King) in the camp. It’s a sure-fire way to surprise a viewer at the start of a Holocaust drama, but a love story is exactly what holds this all together.
It unfolds between Lale and Gita (Anna Prochniak), a female prisoner he later married and, at the time of the interviews, has only recently died. As such, we know they both lived, that their love survived Auschwitz, and that they got married. It’s an extraordinary happy ending, all things considered, but the route to it is more than bittersweet. The older Lale is haunted – taunted, even – by the ghosts of those he left behind, the men and women for whom a happy ending was not possible. This is the guilt of the survivor, amplified by the fact that Lale’s job gave him privileges that allowed the love story that sustained him to be a possibility.
There is nothing more peculiarly human than love, and the idea that it can blossom in the most awful of places, then persist across a lifetime, is very appealing.
The Tattooist Of Auschwitz may not look as innovative as the recent Oscarwinning film The Zone Of Interest but comparison is, after all, the thief of joy, and the fact that this show manages to find joy in its setting – and that it’s a true story – is a lovely lesson for us all to take away about finding light in the dark.