Blurred lines: Heather Morris, history and fiction

Her novel the Tattooist of Auschwitz took flak from Holocaust historians. Now she has a sequel.

Heather Morris. Picture: Julian Kingma

Heather Morris tried many ways to become an established writer. She attended seminars and masterclasses and more than a dozen courses on writing scripts and documentaries. She enrolled in a one-year online program with a journalism institute and a five-day course on memoir writing that she left after day one. (“There was no creative freedom.”) And even when she reluctantly decided to turn her favoured story into a book — “I just never thought I could write a novel, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about it” — and found a publisher, success still seemed unlikely. “You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?” her editor remarked upon viewing her first manuscript.

And yet, somehow, Morris the novice trounced even the grandest expectations. In less than two years The Tattooist of Auschwitz has become an international bestseller, sold in 53 countries, with sales, according to her publicist, in excess of three million copies — a figure that ­Morris later corrects: “London tells me it’s closer to four.” Something about her story of a Melbourne man, Lali Sokolov, who had been a tattooist at Auschwitz concentration camp, and his love for Gita, the woman he met there, resonated.

At 66, Morris sold the first 200,000 print ­copies faster than any debut fiction writer in recent Australian literary history, achieving that record in just 75 weeks — 10 weeks faster than anyone had previously, according to Nielsen BookScan. In the 20 months since being published in the UK, her work has become one of the 50 top-selling adult fiction books since BookScan records began there in 1998. Morris is a headliner at the London ­Literature Festival next month, and has addressed myriad audiences, from Canadian TV viewers to prison inmates in the UK.

But acclaim has not been universal. The book has been subjected to a fact-finding report by the administrators of Auschwitz, who were alarmed that details in it might be distorting history. And Morris has experienced a muted response in some circles. “I don’t seem to fit in with their sort of storytelling,” she says of the silence from some of Australia’s literary festivals. “Probably because it’s not literature.” Nor have there been many major interviews here despite the record sales, an upcoming miniseries, a new book and possibly a third. “Nobody asks.”

Lali Sokolov with Heather Morris. Picture: supplied

Until she first sat with Lali Sokolov in his tidy Melbourne apartment in 2003, Morris had never met a Holocaust survivor. “I had read Anne Frank’s diary. I knew probably less — no, probably more than kids being educated today, but very little. My education in a small town in New Zealand didn’t concentrate on that area of World War II.”

She is in the living room of her home on ­Melbourne’s outskirts. After raising their three children in the suburbs, Morris and her husband Steve, a retired IT specialist, moved here 18 years ago, re-establishing their family base in the ­Dandenong Ranges. Surrounded by towering eucalypts, they live in a neighbourhood of sprawling old estates, although their own street, like their single-storey brick home with a “Morris” sign tacked beside the entrance, is more modest.

It is a fitting metaphor for the life in which she now finds herself, a writer who ranks among the nation’s most successful even as her writing style, by her own appraisal, is far from masterful. “I don’t know how to write a great literary piece and I am not going to pretend I do. But I know how I like to read stories and I know what stories I like to read. And that’s simple, short sentences.”

Morris’s own story began on the North Island of New Zealand. She was raised in Te Awamutu, a dairy town and the birthplace of musicians Neil and Tim Finn (their father was her parents’ accountant), whose names she is about to join on the honour board of their local school. She ­completed secretarial studies — she maintains she can still read shorthand upside down — and moved to Melbourne in 1971. In 1991 she finished an arts degree at Monash University as a mature-age student. Four years later she began working in the social work department at Monash Medical Centre, and remained until 2017.

Although countless reports describe Morris as a social worker, she was in fact an office manager. (After graduating from university she once applied to her future employers to become a social worker, she reveals with a laugh, “and they rejected me”.) In her spare time she attended writing courses. She enjoyed films and liked the discipline of ­writing scripts, and was concentrating on crafting screenplays when, in 2003, she met a friend for coffee. “[She said] ‘I have a friend whose mother has just died. His father has asked me to find somebody he can tell his story to. That person can’t be Jewish. You’re not Jewish. Do you want to meet him?’ As casual as that. Right place, right time,” she says liltingly, her words assuming the cadence of a story that has been told often.

Gita Sokolov had died in October and within weeks Morris was meeting her widower, Lali. “He was absolutely grief-stricken. He wouldn’t look at me,” she recalls of her initial encounter with the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor. The death of his wife after 58 years of marriage had left him bereft. It was the start of three years of ­conversations, ­lasting until Sokolov’s death in 2006, about his childhood in Slovakia and his time tattooing other inmates at Auschwitz, where he met and fell in love with Gita.

In her early 50s, Morris was being exposed to some of the most atrocious details of World War II for the first time. Yet rather than being a hindrance, her comparative lack of knowledge about the Holocaust, she says, “made me the perfect person”. “[He] couldn’t believe there would be a ­Jewish person alive who wasn’t touched by the Holocaust; they would have their own story, their own baggage. I brought none of these concerns to hearing his story and [was] able to write it unencumbered with any personal history.”

One day Sokolov showed her the number 32407 that had been indelibly inked to his arm when he was imprisoned at the concentration camp. “I had never seen a tattooed number before he pulled up his sleeve and showed me. And it was, ‘Wow’. I had heard about them. I had never seen one. [I was] shocked that someone could be branded that long ago and it was still there… this wasn’t just a stamp that could wash off.”

Although much of what she was hearing and seeing was disturbing and new, Morris’s approach to recording Sokolov’s wartime experiences was informal, at least initially. Like many Holocaust survivors, the Sokolovs had both completed video testimonies for posterity with the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation. Lali had recorded a second testimony with Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre. Both his accounts had been voiced when he was almost a decade younger, his memories sharper, and he was not in mourning for his wife.

Still, Morris mostly relied on her first-hand conversations with him for the book she would later write. “I didn’t go reading any other testimonies,” she says when asked about the research she undertook to compare or contextualise Sokolov’s experiences with other accounts. She has often said that for some time she did not even write down what Sokolov told her of his time as an Auschwitz tattooist and the horrific setting in which he met Gita. “I became his friend. I never interviewed him,” she says. “I never saw it like that. For a long time I thought this man was feeling a degree of comfort in his grief talking to someone outside the family.”

And then, a few days after turning 90, Sokolov’s long life ended. “I was with Lali two hours before he died and the last thing I said before I kissed him goodbye was that I would never ever stop trying to tell his story.” In January 2007, Morris’s obituary of Sokolov, then unknown to the world, was published in The Guardian, a loving piece that remembered him as “the camp tattooist” (researchers at Auschwitz have since said he was one of many). By then Morris had penned a screenplay that was optioned for six years, during which time, she says, Film Victoria paid for professional researchers to work on historical details. They also probed the life of Cecilia Klein, an Auschwitz inmate who figured in the survival stories of both Sokolovs, material that would become ­valuable background for Morris’s future work.

The screenplay stalled so in 2016, a decade after Sokolov’s death, Morris launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $11,000 to allow her to take time off work to pen the book she had finally, reluctantly, concluded was her best option for telling his story. “Before I got a publisher I was going to self-publish 100 copies and give them away.”

Without writing a word, she raised the full amount courtesy of 41 donors, mostly from the US. Through that campaign, Morris was also ­contacted by a young Australian publisher, Angela Meyer, and soon she had a book contract. She started writing in October 2016, but by January 2017 “I wasn’t getting anywhere; it wasn’t working for me”. Later that year she flew to California to her brother’s holiday house and, after so long, “knocked it off” in a month.

In January last year, The Tattooist of Auschwitz hit the UK market in the fiction genre. Australia followed a month later. By April, Morris’s name was on bookshelves in Poland and the US, where it topped the New York Times bestseller list for weeks, and eventually in dozens of markets around the world. “My holy shit moment? When London rang me in about the second week and said, ‘You’re number one’.”

History is debatable and its retelling is invariablyincomplete. Fictionalise it and you risk being exposed to criticism, as the Man Booker Prize-winning writer Hilary Mantel has discovered. In a talk at the Hay literary festival in 2017, one of Britain’s most respected Tudor historians, John Guy, said that increasing numbers of prospective students believed that Mantel’s acclaimed novels about the English statesman Thomas ­Cromwell (which are fictional, although based on exhaustive research) were true. “This blur between fact and fiction is troubling,” Guy said.

Fictionalising Nazi genocide is even more fraught, especially if the result appears to sugar-coat or minimise the gravity of events in the death camps, or casually disregard known facts. In Poland, the custodians of Auschwitz say that increasing numbers of visitors assume Morris’s book is historically precise. (Morris says her account of Sokolov’s life is about 85 per cent true.) In November last year, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum ­produced a list of errors “as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and under­statements” that created an inauthentic view of the camp, even though the book came with a rider that “every reasonable attempt to ­verify the facts against available documentation has been made”. Given the book’s popularity, researcher Dr Wanda Witek-Malicka wrote, there were concerns “that this title will become for many readers a source of knowledge and imagination about the reality of life in KL Auschwitz”.

The report found that Morris’s book seemed to be based solely on Sokolov’s memory, and that while accounts of survivors were extremely valuable, the nature of human memory, especially where the events occurred more than 70 years ago, requires confirmation with other sources. Many best-selling historical fiction writers have been the subject of harsh critiques, but rarely on this scale and from an organisation as august.

Was Morris upset or encouraged by the report? “A bit of both,” she says evenly. “At first I thought, ‘Oh, this is great because they’ve found some information that I haven’t got’. But then it started to turn to, ‘We don’t necessarily want this story being told the way it’s being told, because the ­Holocaust should be seen in its totality and not through the eyes of an individual.’ And some of their behaviour… anyone who does a tweet and mentions my name, within seconds they are bombarded [by the museum] with information. I think there is room for both of us in this world.”

Morris says her task in writing a book based on one man’s Holocaust experience was “to [as] ­accurately as possible reflect the event, but always going back to Lali’s memory”. There were times she questioned details of his accounts. “And he wanted me to. He encouraged me to check. And… it gave me no comfort that what he told me was correct,” she says. “I ended up getting to a point where I decided, ‘You know what? This is this man’s story and his memory. And I am not writing the story of the Holocaust. I am just writing one story’. I wanted to give more weight to his memory. And if it could be challenged, challenge me on it. That’s fine. But few people can, because every person — their experience [was] different.”

The custodians of Auschwitz, who did challenge her, continue to stress the importance of telling individual stories from the concentration camp. “However, artists who take upon themselves a challenging task of telling stories on behalf of the survivors have also great responsibility of preserving historical accuracy,” says press officer Pawel Sawicki. “The truth about the Holocaust is sometimes distorted. That is why we need to ­protect this clear distinction between reality and fiction.”

Morris argues she was writing one man’s story of the Holocaust, not the definitive account. Her publisher Angela Meyer adds that everyone ­working on the book was keenly aware of the responsibilities they faced. “Fictionalising history should always be done respectfully and carefully, of course. A historical novel should honour the struggles and suffering, but also the joy and the love and everyday small moments of the people who lived through it. This is what Heather does.”

The controversy that has ensnared Morris’s book is not so much about her intent as its execution. She did not visit Auschwitz until months after the book was published, “because then I would be describing it though my eyes, not Lali’s”. She has never, she says, accessed Auschwitz’s extensive archives, some of which are online. “Documents don’t tell the whole story. And 80 per cent of the documents from Auschwitz are destroyed. They give you the facts, the dates. They don’t describe what was going on.”

Given the weight and extent of the fact-finding report, Morris is stoic and courteous in her response. She accepts part of the criticism, particularly in not depicting Auschwitz as ­graphically as many others have. “That was the biggest ­challenge I had, what to leave out about what was evil.” To have included more details, she says, “would have made it a document or a historical document more than a love story”.

But she is also defiant. The Auschwitz report highlights, among other things, irregularities in a map included in the book’s appendix, such as the erroneous inclusion of a “recreational area” at the concentration camp. Yet when she did finally tour Auschwitz last year, it was laid out, Morris insists, just as Sokolov had told her. “I think I did a pretty good job describing it through his eyes.”

Auschwitz’s files on Sokolov are derived in part from the camp’s Penal Company Book. It lists Sokolov under his original surname, Eisenberg, and shows his first name as Ludovit and Ludowit. (Morris, like Sokolov himself, used Ludwig.) But it’s the spelling of his pet name that has aroused concern. In Melbourne, where he spent his post-war life, Sokolov was known by some as Lou, but mostly as Lali. ­Morris has opted for Lale, the ­spelling she says he approved. Moreover, she adds, as a pet name he would have rarely used it in an official capacity. “I’m not going to lose sleep over the spelling of names.” Yet an image of Gita Sokolov’s tombstone, and the ­official listing for Sokolov’s own grave, both ­accessible on the ­internet, list him as Lali, as does the biographical attachment to his Shoah ­Foundation testimony.

There have been other questions about ­identification. When first published in Australia, the book opened with a description of Sokolov ­tattooing the numbers 34902 onto his future wife — a number that also appeared on the book cover. But Gita testified that she had been tattooed at the camp with the prisoner number 4562, which was issued before Lali had even arrived at the camp. Morris maintains that Gita was retattooed (and somehow given a different number). “Hindsight is wonderful,” she ­concedes. “Maybe we should have gone with the one Gita was originally given.”

Lali and Gita Sokolov in Slovakia after the war. Picture: supplied

During their years of meetings, Sokolov and Morris discussed Cilka Klein, a young Slovakian survivor who had endured years in Auschwitz and whom Sokolov credited with saving his life. “She was the bravest person I ever met.” So recounts Morris in the notes to her newest work, Cilka’s Journey, another account of a Holocaust survivor that is also pitched as a work of fiction but this time based on second-hand testimony as well as her own research.

Cilka featured in The ­Tattooist of Auschwitz as a sex slave for SS officers and since its publication, Morris had been repeatedly asked by readers about her fate. Her decision to reimagine Klein’s journey from the concentration camp to a ­Russian gulag on charges of having slept with the enemy at Auschwitz was made more ­difficult by the fact that Klein had been dead for more than a decade. “I only had Lali’s memory. I had the bit that Gita spoke about [in her testimony]. I knew that Gita had visited her in Slovakia. And then I met the people in Slovakia who knew her.”

One person who did meet her was Gary Sokolov, the only child of Gita and Lali. He was in his early teens when he and his mother visited Klein in the ’70s. “I do remember how stunning she was.” Although he had provided a supportive afterword for the book about his parents, he has had no contact with Morris since January and was not involved with Cilka’s Journey.

Cecilia (Cilka) Klein was 16 when she was shipped to Auschwitz from her home in Bardejov, Slovakia. She became the leader of Block 25, a notorious building that held some female prisoners before they were gassed. Klein spent the rest of the war at Auschwitz, which is where, Morris says, she met Gita and then Lali Sokolov. Still a teenager, she says, Klein became a sex slave, and her position at the camp rendered her both privileged and despised. “Did she sleep with them? No, she was f..ked by them,” Morris says emphatically, in a rare lapse from her otherwise calm demeanour. “She was given warm clothing in winter. She could be seen walking around in a heavy coat, she was given extra food, she was protected. But this wouldn’t have stopped her being killed on any given day.”

There are few first-hand accounts about Klein. The Shoah Foundation testimony of a contemporary from Bardejov alludes to a darker side to her role as block leader. He said that while she had smuggled him some much-needed food, she was also “an absolute murderer. There is probably more blood on her hands than anybody else”.

But survival has many guises, and for Sokolov, Klein was a hero. When he was found with ­contraband and severely beaten, she managed to convince SS officials to release him and his life was saved. After Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, Klein, not yet 20, was accused of spying and sleeping with the enemy and was sent to a Russian labour camp for 10 years. She later married and lived in Slovakia. She did not have children.

Before her death in 2004, Klein spoke to ­Slovakian writer Peter Juscak. She had reluctantly discussed some of her tortured history with him after the death of her husband, Ivan Kovac. In a taped interview with Juscak, she revealed that when she and Kovac had returned to live in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, “we said we would never talk about our experience”. And, says ­Juscak, she “insisted on keeping her secret about the Auschwitz and Vorkuta [gulag] drama until her death”.

“Her silence was the only effective defence against hate,” says Juscak, who is believed to be the only person to have ever interviewed Klein about her wartime experiences. “I recorded her words: ‘I was accused by an investigator that I had provided sexual services for Germans.’ Cilka (firmly) refused this accusation,” he says in an email interview. “Nevertheless, she was condemned and deported to a camp in the north of Russia.” She would not have been alone. Says ­Juscak, who has researched the methods of agents of the NKVD, the communist secret police: “Many innocent people ended up in their hands and then in labour camps.”

While rape in war remains vastly under-­reported, Klein, a “tough, vigorous” woman, “decisively” refuted that she had slept with the SS, says Juscak. With the release of Cilka’s Journey, he is concerned that a version of her history, which she had so adamantly guarded, is about to be released to the world. “People who survived hell,” he says, “have the right to their secrets.”

Morris maintains hers is a “pretty accurate” account, based on her own visits to Slovakia and the help of researchers. The book also includes an outline of what she knows to be true: Klein’s birth in Slovakia in March 1926, and her arrival in Auschwitz on April 23, 1942 where she became prisoner 5907, and where, according to Morris, she later met Gita and Lali.

What she does not mention — and presumably does not realise — is that Lali Sokolov also arrived at Auschwitz on April 23, 1942. Of 543 Jewish men on his transport, he was one of only 41 still alive after 16 weeks. And, according to the respected historical tome the Auschwitz ­Chronicle, he had been transported to the death camp on the same train as Cilka Klein.

Heather Morris. Picture: Julian Kingma

Like truth, success can be elusive. Morris waitedmore than a decade for the world to embrace Sokolov’s story. For much of that time it had been freely available via his two videotaped testimonies that are still accessible online. Why then has her book been such a hit? Morris believes it is the combination of being a love story, the ­inclusion of a camp tattooist (“making this iconic ­symbol did make him different to other prisoners”), Sokolov’s confident personality, but mostly timing. “It may not have resonated 10 years ago if I had written it as a book,” she says. “In terms of the unrest there is in many parts of the world right now, people are looking for that story of hope.”

With the release of Cilka’s Journey, she is expecting more feedback. “I suspect the same thing will happen when the book comes out as happened with the Tattooist, people will come out and speak out and contact me and the publishers.” She may well encounter criticism for references in her second book, like her first, to prisoners lolling on the grass at Auschwitz, even searching for four-leaf clovers when there was no grass in the heavily trampled concentration camp. A scene in which children at Auschwitz call out “pick me, pick me” to the barbaric physician Josef Mengele, who ­performed gruesome experiments on twins, is also likely to generate controversy for its questionable depiction of one of the most reviled Nazis.

“What these distortions do is they are rewriting and they are minimising and they are feeding into the minimisation of the horrors of what actually took place,” says Holocaust archivist Dr Anna Hirsh. She worries that inaccuracies can feed into denial, particularly when the last survivors are on the cusp of dying. “I find that extremely disrespectful to those who suffered so terribly and who were damaged for the rest of their lives.”

“If you are going to fictionalise or adapt a true story based on a personal testimony, I think it is really important to ensure that it is built on a foundation of reality,” says her colleague Lisa Phillips, director of education at Melbourne’s Jewish ­Holocaust Centre. “The concern is always, what becomes the dominant historical knowledge?”

No amount of criticism, though, appears to have rattled Morris. Through hours of interview she remains upbeat and friendly. Later she brings out a video of an elderly woman she recently met in Israel, a fan of her first book and also an Auschwitz survivor. “I was there,” the old lady tells Morris and stares at the camera. “And it’s true all the things that it said in the book… I lived it too. And I am now 93 years old and I remember all the things that happened there.”

The short clip ends and Morris turns away from the screen. The footage is new, just a few months old, and full of potential. She is hoping to use it during yet another promotional tour that is about to take her away from home again for many weeks. And she’s thinking that maybe the ­Holocaust experiences of this woman and her ­sisters might make for a fine trilogy.

Cilka’s Journey (Echo, $32.99) is out Tuesday