Review: The Tattooist of Auschwitz
- tatedecaro
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
3/5 stars
The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris (2018)
This is a work of historical fiction, based on interviews Morris did with Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew who spent two and a half years in the WWII concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. An educated man, Lale spoke many languages and was able to use this to his advantage in the camps, where becoming "useful" to the guards could save your life. Lale was assigned the task of tattooing the numbers on prisoners' arms, and, in exchange, received better living quarters, extra rations, and more freedom to move about the camps. He used these privileges to save countless lives by sharing food, and by bartering with local inhabitants for medicine, food, and other amenities - to bribe the guards with, or to give to fellow prisoners. He also met his future wife, Gita, secreting away moments to spend with her and working to keep her alive.
It's an incredibly harrowing account, but ultimately, I want to hear Lale's actual story, without the fictionalization. This is a real man who survived very real atrocities, and it does a disservice to him, and to every other person who died in or survived the camps (and the war in general), to romanticize it. And while Morris is not a bad writer, it's written in a rather simplistic style, and often felt like it teetered on the edge of YA. It describes moments of hope and love despite shocking and gruesome horrors, but it tells them with rose-colored glasses. And maybe this is just how Lale saw the world. But it bothered me when, for instance, Lale would declare that he and Gita would survive the camps just because he decided they would. I'm sure many, many people resolved to survive, but, given the deaths of 6 million Jewish and 5+ million non-Jewish people, it's clear that resolve was not the central factor to surviving. To me, this made it seem like Morris was saying, "if only people had been as determined as Lale, maybe they would have survived too." I'm sure that wasn't the intent, but it's a dangerous thought to hint at.
This is not to poo-poo a love story that was so clearly fundamental to Lale and Gita's survival. I just wish I'd read this as a work of non-fiction, and that it was a better balance of the hope and the horror.
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