Review of the series The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Not so much a historical as a melodramatic miniseries, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the book of the same name by Australian nurse Heather Morris. While working in a public hospital in Melbourne and trying to become a writer, she met an old man named Lali Sokolov (formerly Ludwig Eisenberg), who was recently widowed and eventually told the nurse an autobiographical story about how he and his deceased wife were Slovak Jews and prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942-1945.

The series is organized in the form of interviews and flashbacks. Old Lali is played by Harvey Keitel, and the writer is portrayed by New Zealand actress Melanie Lynskey.

The year is 2003. A hospital worker visits a Holocaust survivor several times a week, who has long lived in a cozy house on the oceanfront in peace and prosperity. However, the ghosts of the past still haunt him… Sometimes they meet on the street, in a park or by the beach. The blue sea makes noise, the sun’s rays hug and lull them to sleep, and the delicacies from Lali’s favorite bakery add a little more happiness to their already wonderful days… His beloved wife Gita is no longer with him, but they lived a wonderful long life together. “I don’t have much time left.” “You don’t have much time for an interview today?” “No, I mean I’m going to die soon, I’m old.

While telling Heather his story, Lali is so immersed in the darkest and at the same time the most wonderful moments of the past (after all, he met the love of his life in Auschwitz) that he sometimes ceases to distinguish reality from reminiscence, and the past and present merge into a single existential reflection, a single great heavy feeling of being lost in time and unredeemed guilt.

Guilt for being a tattoo artist (he worked for the Nazis, filling rooms with prisoners, for which he received more and better food, a separate room in the barracks, a more comfortable bed, the protection of a German guard…); for making a kind of “friendship” with a Nazi; for doing things for his own and Gita’s survival that, to put it mildly, are not something to be proud of; for surviving, while millions of others did not; for living a happy life with his beloved, while others lost their loved ones; for eating cakes on the ocean shore today, while others are left with only bones and memory…

It’s hard to say whether The Tattoo Artist of Auschwitz is more about love or guilt. Or about the guilt of love? Undoubtedly, no one, except Lali himself and those who were in the Nazi concentration camps, has any moral right to accuse anyone of anything. Absolutely not at all and under any circumstances. But self-reproach always hurts much more than any reproaches from the outside. And in fact, there is a very big doubt that Lali Sokolov was able to really live a full and happy life. Although time, as they say, heals, and memory fails and allows us to rewrite history. The faces of the dead, which appear silently on the screen over and over again, like living photographs (not archival footage, but fictional ones), somehow tend to disappear.

Interestingly, Heather Morris wrote a whole trilogy about Auschwitz: “The Tattoo Artist of Auschwitz, The Journey of Cilka (the story of the beautiful Cecilia Klein, who survived Auschwitz because she liked the senior commandant and clearly had an intimate relationship with him, but after the war was accused by the Soviet “liberators” of collaboration and was sent to Siberia for many years to the Vorkuta Gulag, The Promise of the Sisters, about three Slovak Jewish sisters who survived a concentration camp and a death march and eventually made it to Israel, but the suffering did not stop there and the shadows did not disappear… On the one hand, the writer shrouded the real Nazi hell in almost criminal melodrama and romanticization, turning unimaginable horror into “a horror that can be tolerated and even read, and even tearful from a touching love story.” But on the other hand, it is Heather Morris’s sentimental approach (sometimes frankly soft, frivolous and superficial, dictated by an unwillingness to look at the hard essence and truth and at the same time an infantile desire to look for the positive in everything) that allowed these six episodes to be watchable without suffering mental trauma.

Journalists, literary critics, and historians (including historians of the Auschwitz Memorial Museum) have identified the novel The Tattoo Artist as not reflecting the real picture of what happened in the most horrific place on earth. Moreover, many historical and factual errors were exposed. For example, the numbers of prisoners mentioned in the book were not the same as those in the archival documents, and the episode where Lali gets penicillin for Gita, who was dying of sepsis, was called simply impossible because because as of 1942, the first antibiotic was still in the status of an experimental drug that was not yet in use (however, it is quite possible that Nazi doctors did have this life-saving miracle mold, but it is hard to believe that a Nazi doctor would give it to a Jew).

In this sense, the series looks more honest than its literary basis. After all, unlike the nurse-writer, the show’s authors immediately present Lali Sokolov as an “unreliable narrator” (and in some scenes we are even shown how he is not telling us what really happened, how he is being deceitful because of the same sense of guilt, how he seems to be sincerely confessing, but who knows if he is completely honest…). So even if we trust the author, who seems to have added virtually no artistic speculation, Lala’s bare story cannot be taken at face value. Because he was very old when he told it; because so many years had passed since Auschwitz; because the view of one person’s history is always subjective; because he was obviously ashamed and despised himself for many things he did then… But somehow this series offers a pleasant (as far as it is possible in the context of the Holocaust) alternative that even in the greatest hell on the earth’s surface, there was still “life.”