This love story leaves an indelible mark

Despite the horror, and there’s plenty of it, the The Tattooist of Auschwitz has hope and love at its core.

The Tattooist Of Auschwitz tells us that even in the darkest pit of hell, there is light. That light is human love.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is as harrowing, brutal and soul-sickening as you would expect, laying out six episodes of utter horror.

It depicts the orchestrated evil of the concentration camps, sadistic Nazi soldiers actively enjoying the hangings, the death wall executions, the bundling of small children off to the gas chamber, the random shooting of men for using the toilet. But it also tells us that even in the darkest pit of hell, there is light. That light is human love.

Yes, that may sound a bit glib and schmaltzy for such atrocious circumstances. But the love story on which this adaptation is based is true, as described in Heather Morris’s best-selling book of the same name.

The best-selling book by Heather Morris.

Two Jewish prisoners from Slovakia meet in Auschwitz and begin a love affair. Lali Sokolov had to tattoo numbers on the arm of Gita Fuhrmannova, apologising as he dug into her flesh. They endured torture, starvation and near death but found a joy in each other. “See the beauty of your life even here,” she tells him.

It is also an insight into what people had to do to survive. “It’s not just what was done to us, it was what it made us into.” In a terrible scene Lali describes what he had to do to get medicine for a dangerously ill Gita (Anna Prochniak). The scene involves women who had just been forcibly sterilised, and it is horrendous. In another he is forced to slap a pregnant woman at gunpoint.

It should be said that the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre criticised Morris’s book, saying it contained errors and “exaggerations, misinterpretations and ­understatements”.

Apparently there is no way, for instance, Lali could have obtained penicillin for Gita’s typhus. Morris has admitted that she used artistic licence. But as a dramatic device to remind viewers, especially younger ones, of the fiendishly cruel violence visited on prisoners by the Nazis, it succeeds. It certainly doesn’t turn away from the brutality. Some of the scenes you will never forget.

It is made clear from the opening seconds that Lali, played by Harvey Keitel as an old man and Jonah Hauer-King as the young man in Auschwitz-Birkenau, survived and this feels to me a blessing. Because without that knowledge it would be even more unbearable. Keitel is outstanding as the older man, still tormented with guilt, having taken a job as a tattooist that afforded him privileges that helped him survive. “I was 26 and I wanted to live,” he says.

Keitel’s face is an ever-changing tapestry of pain as he tells Morris, his biographer played by Melanie Lynskey, a complex story that refuses to follow a happy-ever-after arc (depression and trauma followed “like a sick dog”). Hauer-King’s portrayal of Lali in the camp, at times barely able to walk, is haunting.

Strangely, his relationship with Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay), the psychopathic, rather dim block officer who treated Lali like his personal toy, sometimes facilitating his clandestine meetings with Gita like a monstrous cupid, at others beating him to a pulp, is often more grimly interesting than the love story.

Baretzki, who has a juvenile preoccupation with sex, tells Lali he is like a brother to him, suggesting self-awareness really wasn’t his thing.

Astonishingly, we learn that Baretzki, who frequently returns as a ghost at Keitel’s shoulder, asked Lali to vouch for him at his war crimes trial.

It is probably easy to pick holes in this adaptation but it is still a compelling piece of storytelling. It will doubtless sell a lot more books.

The Tattooist of Auschwitzis streaming on Stan..