The horror of Auschwitz... but it felt like a soapy Mills & Boon
The Tattooist Of Auschwitz Thursday, Sky Atlantic ★★☆☆☆
Clarkson’s Farm Friday, Prime Video ★★★★☆
The Tattooist Of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris, has sold 12 million copies since being published in 2018 and seems to be part of an entire industry. I had no idea until I put ‘Auschwitz’ into the search bar on Amazon and instead of coming back with the eyewitness accounts of Primo Levi or Viktor Frankl, or any of the books written and researched by historians, it was: The Midwife Of Auschwitz, The Druggist Of Auschwitz, The Last Boy In Auschwitz, The Daughter Of Auschwitz, The Librarian Of Auschwitz and so on.
There are many more. I thought maybe, for my own contribution, I could write The Dressmaker Of Auschwitz, but no. Already taken. The Cheesemonger Of Auschwitz, that seems to be up for grabs, though. Do you know a cheesemonger who was in Auschwitz?
People have to get their Holocaust education somewhere, I suppose, but this commercial exploitation makes me uneasy, as does ‘based on a true story’. This book is ‘based on a true story’ and Morris’s conversations with Auschwitz survivor Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew who worked for his captors tattooing identification numbers on new arrivals. In the camp he fell in love with another prisoner, Gita Furman, and they married after the war.
It is a remarkable story, but after it was published the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum pointed to numerous mistakes and factual impossibilities, even though, ethically and morally, the one thing you always have to get right is the Holocaust. If you don’t, you are just giving the deniers the opportunity to say, ‘But that never happened.’ The book is now listed as ‘historical fiction’, which is what precisely? Don’t we deserve to know exactly what we are reading? And, now, watching?
We don’t know exactly what we’re watching but, given the book’s sales, it was inevitable there would be a screen dramatisation, and here it is, in six parts.
The framing device is Morris (Melanie Lynskey) interviewing Lale (Harvey Keitel) in his old age in his Australian home after the death of Gita. Morris, here, is always teary-eyed and doing sad face, and I did think: hasn’t Lale suffered enough? She doesn’t take notes and there is no tape recorder, which seemed odd, but there you are. This is told in flashback so we spool back to meet Lale, now played by Jonah Hauer-King, in 1942 and taking one of the first trains from Bratislava to the camp to protect his family. This does not spare us from the horrors of Auschwitz: the beatings, the hangings, the starvation, the gas chambers, the black smoke rising from those chimneys, the psychopathic and sadistic Nazis.
But violence becomes gratuitous if not earned and the central love story, as dramatised here, wasn’t portrayed convincingly enough or with sufficient depth.
Lale is appointed a tattooist, and it’s as he’s tattooing newly arrived Gita (Anna Prochniak) – one of the book’s blunders was to get her number wrong but it’s corrected here – that their eyes meet and it’s love at first sight. Their romance can only proceed in snatched moments, but as both characters remain one-dimensional it never achieves any kind of emotional heft.
Mostly, this felt like a soapy Mills & Boon storyline unfolding against a backdrop of concentration camp porn while music soars. (I wish there was no music in Holocaust dramatisations. Ever.) Gita, especially, is a thin, underwritten character, while Hauer-King is mostly required to adopt a look of dazed longing. Complexities are raised – Lale’s guilt post-war that he’d been a collaborator, his relationship with one particular guard – but the drama is never complex enough in itself to deal with such issues. The bottom line is that I never felt anything and, because the characters are never developed it seemed repetitive and slow. That’s the other worry: turn the Holocaust into an industry and people will become de-sensitised. And, yes, bored.
On to the third series of Clarkson’s Farm, which is my favourite farming show ever, for what it’s worth, and to think that I didn’t imagine anything could beat Our Yorkshire Farm. It’s business as usual with ‘everything going wrong that could go wrong’ for Jeremy and his sidekick, Kaleb Cooper, who is now ‘farm manager’. They could be Baldrick and Blackadder, actually. Baldrick (Clarkson) with his cunning (ie stupid) plans, while Blackadder (Cooper) rolls his eyes? Although it’s blackberries that preoccupy them in the first episode (of four, with another four landing on Friday), and the special picking machine that ends up bringing down a wall.
It is very funny, but don’t despair. Clarkson has a cunning plan that involves rigging up a Henry vacuum cleaner and, miracle of miracles, it’s not that stupid. Surprisingly, it actually works.
It does feel more obviously staged than previous series, in the sense that ‘Cheerful Charlie’, the land agent, always turns up at the right time, by which I mean the wrong time, just as Clarkson’s endeavour to mend his dam has resulted in reversing a tractor into a tree. That sort of thing.
But it’s still beautifully photographed and fantastically interesting – the cost of fertiliser, I had no idea – and sometimes incredibly emotional.
Episode four, that’s the emotional one, involving as it does the farm’s newly acquired pigs, and what does a neighbouring farmer tell Jeremy about pigs? ‘They are,’ he tells Jeremy, ‘terrible mothers.’
This episode is named ‘Harrowing’ for a reason and Jeremy cried, Lisa cried, and I cried. It’s not the show that should have had me in tears this week. But it did.