If you feel as though no one apart from Jews cares about antisemitism, take a look at the bestselling book lists for 2018 and think again.
Last week the paperback fiction list in the UK was headed by a novel which takes the Shoah as its topic. The Tattooist of Auschwitz has sold more than 750,000 copies worldwide since it was published by Zaffre last January, a bestseller in hardback as well as paperback. It is being adapted for television. It is a very fair bet to say that many people unwrapped Christmas presents this week and found that their friends or relatives thought they would like to read a book about life — yes, life — in an extermination camp where millions perished.
The book is a fictional version of the lives of real people. Writer Heather Morris met Lale Sokolov, as an old man, living in Australia. He was mourning his wife, Gita, and wanted to tell their love story. Morris was keen to find a subject for a film script. They had regular meetings, and the novel is the result, the story of Sokolov’s survival as a Jewish prisoner who was given the job of tattooing identification numbers on prisoners’ arms in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and the love that grew between him and his wife, Gita, whom he says he met as he marked her arm with the number given to her by the Nazis.
Inevitably, given the way the story was conveyed and written, there have been accusations of inaccuracy. Earlier this month, the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre claimed that inaccuracies in the novel blurred its authenticity. Wanda Witek-Malicka’s report said that “the book contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts, as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements”. Her concern was mainly that readers would treat the book as a as “a source of knowledge and imagination about the reality of life” in the camp.
I read her report with great interest, because this time last year I was asked to edit a younger readers’ version of The Tattooist of Auschwitz. I accepted this job as someone who writes for young people — not as a historian — and I assumed that the fact-checking had been done satisfactorily for the adult edition. I thought that it was better for young people to read a novel where a Jew is central, active and a narrator of his own story than many of the alternatives on offer. And sure it would be an inprovement on poorly researched pieces of cultural appropriation like, say, the best-selling Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, dashed off in a month by John Boyne.
It was easy to edit the book for teenagers. The prose is clear and concise, the voice is that of a young adult. There was a little swearing to remove, and some sex (which made the book much better, as the sex scenes are the worst written parts of the book). But the story is told in a way that a 12-year-old can understand without utter devastation. And that is a strength of the book — it makes it accessible, readable, an engaging story of hope— but also its weakness. For in creating a hopeful story from the ashes, inevitably it fails to convey the full horror.
There was one scene which pulled me up short when editing. Lale asks Gita if she trusts him. “I do,” she answers. Morris writes: “Lale liked the sound of those two little words. ‘One day you will say those two little words to me under different circumstances. In front of a rabbi, surrounded by our family and friends.’” But, of course, this makes no sense as a conversation between two Slovakian Jews. Either Lale told his story in terms that Heather Morris would understand — the language of Christianity obliterating Judaism — or she has invented details like this to universalise his story. I suggested that this exchange did not appear in the new edition.
Morris side-stepped the issue of complete accuracy by presenting Sokolov’s story as a novel. I think she was right to do that. First, because that story was told to her many years after the events described, and it would be an impossible job to find all the people involved to verify their stories. Second, because his retelling would have been shaped by the very many years he stayed silent, terrified of being painted as a collaborator. When people throw around words like “kapo”, as they seem to do increasingly nowadays, they cheapen the fight for survival that many had to face. It is not for us to judge them for staying alive in the face of mass murder.
Witek-Malicka is right to scrutinise the account put forward in the Tattooist of Auschwitz. The truth of the Shoah must never be lost, and inaccuracy must be called out.
But I am not sorry that Heather Morris wrote her book, nor that I have worked with her publishers, and I am glad that it is a best-seller. Because we need books that explain the horror of antisemitism, even if, inevitably, it is not the full picture. These books open minds and engage hearts. And The Tattooist of Auschwitz most definitely does that job.
