The Tattooist of Auschwitz’s Heather Morris: ‘Holocaust deniers? They are cowards’
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When Heather Morris told her octogenarian friend Lale Sokolov that she wanted to write a screenplay about his experiences in Auschwitz, he was delighted. “We would go to the movies to find the perfect person to play him,” Morris recalls. “Finally, we went to see Ryan Gosling in The Notebook [in 2004], and he stood up and told a cinema full of people that he’d found the actor to play him in the story of his life. And they applauded him! He always owned the room.”
Morris mustered little studio interest in her screenplay either before or after Sokolov’s death, aged 90, in 2006. Finally, in 2018, she turned the reminiscences that Sokolov had shared with her into a novel: The Tattooist of Auschwitz. It became a more-or-less overnight publishing phenomenon, and today sales are north of 13 million copies. And now the story is fulfilling its destiny and coming to the screen, as a six-part miniseries for Sky Atlantic.
The story that Sokolov told Morris when she got to know him in the last three years of his life is certainly the stuff of bestsellers. A Slovakian Jew, Sokolov was interned in Auschwitz in 1942 and, as he spoke several languages, was given the job of tattooing prisoners’ numbers on their arms on arrival.
He organised a scheme for smuggling food and medicine to his fellow prisoners, survived typhus and torture, and fell in love at first sight with a woman called Gita while he was tattooing her. Despite its heinous backdrop, their courtship led to a marriage that endured for 58 years.
The television series marks the culmination of an extraordinary half-dozen years for Morris, in which she has transitioned from retired social worker to blockbuster debut author, and been both acclaimed as a Holocaust educator and rebuked by some official organisations for inaccuracies in her work.
Speaking to me over Zoom from her home in Brisbane, Morris, who is 70, is unfailingly genial, but robust in defending herself against criticism. There is a hint of steel in her voice even as she laughs about media reports that she has fallen out with Sokolov’s son, Gary, over royalties from the book. “I have just spent a week with him in Melbourne. If he’d hugged me any more I’d have been bruised.”
Morris was a script consultant for the new TV series: “It seems to have helped [the screenwriters] because what they’ve come up with is Lale to a T.” As the young Lale, Jonah Hauer-King certainly captures the amiable, flirty character in the book whom even the Nazis never quite rob of his happy-go-lucky spirit.
Would Sokolov have approved of the portrayal? “He would have seen Jonah as being perfect casting, because Lale always considered himself a good-looking boy and there is no question that Jonah meets that criteria. He’d have found things to criticise – he was never shy of saying what he thought – but he would have been so honoured to have his story told so wonderfully.”
Interspersed with the Auschwitz scenes, bleakly evocative in washed-out colours, there are also recreations of the aged Sokolov – played by Harvey Keitel – relaying his memories to Morris (played by Melanie Lynskey) in the mid-2000s. “I got to meet [Keitel] in Bratislava before shooting: he asked me about his mannerisms and speech. He more than got him: he gave me Lale back. Thank you, Harvey, you’ve given the world Lale as I knew him.”
Born in New Zealand, Morris has always been a forceful character: aged 11, she took a strap to a teacher who was bullying her brother. She has lived in Australia for 30 years, and has three children with her Australian husband. For more than 20 years she had a job in the social care department of a Melbourne hospital, and around the turn of the century, “when the kids were no longer asking me to drive them somewhere all the time”, decided to take a course in screenwriting.
She was casting about for a good subject when “my life changed on the spin of a dime. I was having a cup of coffee with a friend who casually said she had a friend whose mother had just died, and whose father had asked him to find somebody to tell a story to”.
The newly widowed Sokolov, who had emigrated to Australia with Gita in 1948, wanted somebody to set down his memories, stipulating that the person in question should not be Jewish. “99.9 per cent of [Jewish] people I’ve met around the world say that Lale knew what he was doing in not having ‘one of us’ write the story. I had no baggage of my own that could impinge on it.”
Sokolov’s memories came piecemeal: they were three months into their regular meetings before it dawned on Morris just how extraordinary the story was that she was uncovering. “I looked at him and I just blurted out the words: ‘you’re living history!’” They bonded over a shared love of sport: “I’d always turn the conversation round to sport or something before I left – [I would] never leave him in that place.”
The television series emphasises that the elderly Sokolov’s memories are sometimes hazy or contradictory, and Morris has been criticised for taking his word as gospel. The Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre has dubbed her novel “dangerous and disrespectful to history”, citing mistakes such as characters taking penicillin at a time when it was not widely available, Gita’s prisoner number having too many digits and an inaccurate sub-plot about Josef Mengele’s involvement in sterilisation experiments on prisoners. (A memorably sinister presence in the book, Dr Mengele does not feature in the adaptation.)
Morris emphasises that factual errors have been corrected in subsequent editions of the novel, but she has always been reluctant to deviate too much from what Sokolov told her. “The memory of the emotion and the feeling at the time, that’s unique to the individual. Don’t we want these individual stories?”
Isn’t she worried, though, that Holocaust deniers could seize on such discrepancies to bolster their case? “I’ve met a few of them. They run as soon as you confront them – they’re basically cowards. I will not demean Lale’s memory by even considering them as being a problem.”
The book’s success has seen Morris fêted in Sokolov’s home town of Krompachy in Slovakia – “I go back there as often as I can, and the whole village puts on a concert for me” – but she baulks when the residents hail Sokolov as a hero and knows that he would have too. “He was not a hero. I would never judge him for it, but he did what he had to do to survive, which was work for the Devil [as camp tattooist]... I called him an opportunist once, and he looked at me and laughed and said, ‘ah, now you know me’.”
Although she could have rested on her laurels after the success of her debut, Morris has published six books in as many years, focusing on female victims of conflict. One, Cilka’s Journey, continues the story of the woman Sokolov remembered as “the bravest person I ever knew” – Cecília Kováčová, a teenage prisoner who became the reluctant mistress of senior SS officer Johann Schwarzhuber, and saved Sokolov’s life by pleading with Schwarzhuber to spare him from the gas chamber.
Kováčová’s stepson has rebutted the idea that she would have slept with a Nazi even under coercion and in 2020 threatened Morris with legal action, although she tells me that she has not heard anything more from him since. She scoffs at the argument that SS officers were forbidden from having sexual relationships with Jewish women.
“I’ve met with a 98-year-old, shaking her head and trying to wipe away the memory as she told me how she worked in one of the Kanadas [warehouses storing confiscated possessions] for three years, all day every day trying to make herself invisible, because every day the SS came in and just grabbed one of the girls and raped them on the clothes that they were sorting through.”
At a time when anti-Semitism is rife again – “It goes underground but never goes away” – and one in five schoolchildren in the US reportedly think that the Holocaust is a myth, Morris hopes that The Tattooist of Asuchwitz will act as a gateway to the works of Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl. “That’s why Lale wanted his story told. ‘So that’ – in his maybe naive words – ‘it never happens again’.”
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is on Sky Atlantic at 2.05am and 9pm on Thursday 3 May; and as a box set on NOW
