‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’: A New Holocaust Drama That Couldn’t Be Timelier
The Holocaust is the wound that never heals because the hate that fueled it is always here, and one need only look and listen today—with Jews persecuted and demonized at home and abroad, and with vehement calls for their expulsion and extermination as commonplace as they were in the 1930s and 1940s—to be reminded that antisemitism is the world’s eternal ugliness. Thus, Peacock’s six-part limited series The Tattooist of Auschwitz arrives at a particularly auspicious moment. Inspired by both Heather Morris’ best-selling 2018 book and the memories of its main character, it’s a stirring tribute to the perseverance of one man and, by extension, to all who survived the horrors of Hitler’s genocide, and who were rewarded for their triumph with a lifetime of pain, guilt, heartache, and ghosts that refuse to go quietly into the terrible night.
Spearheaded by director Tali Shalom Ezer and writer Jacquelin Perske, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which premieres May 2, is, in several ways, a familiar tale refracted through a novel lens, and at times, its framing device proves a tad clunky. Nonetheless, such intermittent gracelessness is overshadowed by the proceedings’ complexity, poignancy, and horror. In Melbourne, Australia circa 2003, hospital worker Heather (Melanie Lynskey) visits the apartment of Lali Sokolov (Harvey Keitel), a widower and Holocaust survivor to whom she’s been referred by a friend. Lali wants someone to pen his life story and Heather is an aspiring writer. Despite not being Jewish or having any first-hand relationship with the atrocities of WWII, she agrees to the task, sitting with Lali in his sunlit living room as he slowly recounts his unthinkable ordeal.
That begins in 1942 Slovakia, where twentysomething Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) hears that one member of each Jewish household must report to the authorities for work duty. Lali volunteers and is promptly loaded into an overcrowded train and transported to Auschwitz II—Birkenau, the most infamous of the Third Reich’s numerous concentration camps. Upon arriving, he displays courage to the man tasked with giving him his forearm number, and following a nearly fatal illness from which he recovers thanks to his friend’s bravery, he lucks into a job as a tattooist. Through this assignment, he eventually meets Gita (Anna Próchniak), and it’s love at first sight. Amour doesn’t blossom easily in this environment, however, and their ensuing attempts to forge a bond, and to help keep each other alive, involves compromises and choices of a dreadful sort, many of them enabled by a sociopathic Nazi guard named Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay) who takes Lali under his wing.