The Tattooist of Auschwitz, review: an awkwardly saccharine concentration camp love-story
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As a novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz (Sky Atlantic) was always awkward to categorise. One major book chain is currently selling it in the “Scorching Holidays Reads!” section, which is one way to describe a romance set in a concentration camp.
Now this work of historical fiction is a six-part TV drama, and the same situation arises. The scenes of suffering within Auschwitz-Birkenau are so sickening that it feels plain uncomfortable to use it as the setting for a love story, even if that story is based on the recollections of a real Holocaust survivor, Lale Sokolov.
Selected to tattoo serial numbers on fellow Jews as they enter the camp, Slovakian Lale meets a young woman named Gita and instantly falls in love. As they can spend only snatched moments together, the drama focuses more generally on Lale’s experiences in the camp, including a codependent relationship with a callous Nazi guard (Jonas Nay). He must do what he needs to survive. “In this hell we are in, we are only given two choices: the bad one or the worse one,” another prisoner tells him.
The degradation and dehumanisation of the prisoners is familiar from countless dramas and documentaries but no less terrible for that. One man, about to be hanged, laughs with a sort of relief: death will bring him freedom. He has no reason to live after his pregnant wife was sent to the gas chamber.
The story is told in flashback by the elderly Sokolov, dictating his life story to Heather Morris, a hospital worker who volunteers to write his memoir. Sokolov is played by the great Harvey Keitel, but it’s when we go back to the war that the main casting problem becomes apparent.
Jonah Hauer-King plays the young Lale, and he doesn’t have the depth that the role demands. He recently played the prince in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and that suited him better. Polish actress Anna Próchniak does her best with the thin character of Gita. As the saccharine Heather, Melanie Lynskey’s only job is to look soppy and tearful at regular intervals when the story cuts back to the present day.
As to the accuracy of the story: when the novel came out, various aspects of it were contested by the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre, including Lale saving Gita’s life by treating her with penicillin when she contracted typhus (penicillin would have been impossible to get in 1943, the centre said). Who knows if the sex scene really happened. None of that affected the book’s popularity, with several million copies sold. But there are far better screen depictions of the Holocaust out there.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is on Sky Atlantic at 2.05am and 9pm (and NOW) on Thursday 2 May
