Roush Review: ‘Tattooist of Auschwitz’ Etches a Portrait of Love Amid the Hell of the Holocaust
Review
The Tattooist of Auschwitz
In Nazi concentration camps, tattoos were etched on prisoners’ arms in an attempt to erase their humanity, turning them into numbers. The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a wrenching but ultimately uplifting six-part series adapted from the non-fiction novel by Heather Morris, corrects this atrocity by repeatedly presenting a stark gallery of somber faces, among the millions lost to history but burned into the memory of Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor Lali Sokolov (an affecting Harvey Keitel).
Still overcome with anger, grief and guilt in 2003, more than a half-century after the Holocaust, the recently widowed Lali recounts the horrors to novice writer Morris (Melanie Lynskey), framing his account as the most unlikely of love stories. It was in Auschwitz, assigned to tattoo numbers onto incoming prisoners—“It’s worse if you’re gentle,” he’s told—that the cautious Lali (mournful Jonah Hauer-King as the younger man) meets and is instantly smitten by new arrival and future wife Gita (the luminous Anna Próchniak). She jokes about whether he can do her tattoo in pink, and from that moment on, they’ll go to any lengths to spend time together.
They embark on a dangerous, forbidden affair, stealing clandestine moments of desperate intimacy, bribing guards and carrying on under the nose of Lali’s cruel SS handler Baretsky (Deutschland 83’s remarkable Jonas Nay), who forms a twisted brotherly bond with his captive. “We’ll get through this. I’m here for you,” Baretsky tells his appalled puppet, who shrinks from his touch. The ghost of his jailer continues to haunt and taunt Lali, who often sees visions of the Nazi in his otherwise cozy Melbourne, Australia home while unsettling the sympathetic Morris with his stories.
“I don’t know if I’m capable of writing it. I’m actually terrified,” she tells Lali when the accumulation of soul-crushing detail begins to be too much. (The viewer may well feel the same way in this unflinching dramatization.) Lali’s narrative is also affected by his bitter knowledge that because of the status provided by his work duties, he was better off than many in the camp. And yet, as a fellow inmate counsels him, “In this hell we’re in, we are only given two choices: the bad choice and the worst one.”
Lali also shares details of Gita’s struggles, including a nearly fatal infection that, if detected and untreated, could spell her doom. She works alongside a woman who indulges the unwanted affections of a German officer and tells her more romantically inclined acquaintance, “There is no love here, only hate and pain.”
The Tattooist of Auschwitz, for all of its horror, would beg to differ as it offers the overarching message that “Love Will Survive”—which is also the title of the soulful new song Barbra Streisand sings over the end credits.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Limited Series Premiere (six episodes), Thursday, May 2, Peacock