The Tattooist of Auschwitz is Holocaust entertainment for non-Jews

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris’s 2018 novel about a Jew in Birkenau, has become a TV series because hunger for mainstream entertainment about the Shoah is insatiable. It is consoling - if you are not a Jew – and exciting, again if you are not a Jew. If you are very cynical, as I am, you may think it allows the reader to pretend an interest in, and care for, Jewish suffering that rarely extends to Jews who are alive. I wonder the two are connected. I watched “progressives” leave a cinema after watching The Zone of Interest, chirping to each other, and I can’t imagine any of them standing, or even sitting, in solidarity with Jews. But they saw the film, drank a glass of wine, and can now tell themselves they are good and educated people because they watched a film about the Shoah, and can now get back to the business of despising living Jews. That we understand this, and they don’t, is part of the anguish, and the joke. If this interests you, read Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews.

It is true that Morris’s book is about a real person: the Slovakian Jew Lale Sokolov, who was the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau from 1942-45. He fell in love with a fellow prisoner named Gisela Fuhrmannova, married her after the war, moved to Melbourne, and lived a useful life. Lale met Morris in the years before between Gisela’s death and his own. He told her his story, I think, because he wanted absolution for surviving. He didn’t need it and, even if he did, it won’t come from a writer as credulous and self-important as Morris. The blurb says she meticulously reproduces Lale’s fate. She doesn't. She can't. (The Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre published a list of factual errors too long to type. Some are so basic they could have been resolved in an hour). She published 12 years after his death, and I wonder if that is important: the distance allowed her greater freedom to dream.

And she does. In Morris’s hands Lale is a magic Jew: ever-imaginative, resourceful and lucky. Promoted to tattooist, and so saved, he has freedom of movement in the camps, and he dispenses food, medicine, even life itself. The problem with this, of course, is that death in Auschwitz – and almost all died, the majority on arrival – becomes, by compare, a sort of moral failure: a lack of imagination, resource and luck. For those who don’t understand Birkenau – and you wouldn’t read this book if you did, and if this is all you read you wouldn’t – it brings un-magic Jews and Nazi psychopaths no closer.

The prose style is a minor crime. “Her eyes dance before him”. “His heart skips a beat”. “His mind [is] a whirlpool”. He works “around the clock”. (Too many transports, you see: it’s exhausting.) “Flowers. He learned from a young age, from his mother, that women love them”.