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Book review: The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Sophie Cohen approves of a remarkable affair that flourished in horrific conditions

February 23, 2018 15:14
heather morris edit
2 min read

Last November, the American comedian Larry David came under fire for a joke about flirting with women at concentration camps. What, pondered David, in a comic sketch widely slammed by Jews and non-Jews alike, would his Auschwitz chat-up line have been?

For Ludwig “Lale” Eisenberg — the true-life subject of Heather Morris’s debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz — who died in 2003, Larry David’s question was no laughing matter. “How to even begin? How to address her?” Lale racked his brain, the first time he wrote in secret to the woman he had fallen for — actually at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In Morris’s book, the young Slovak, aged 25 when he arrives at the notorious concentration camp in April 1942, is soon put to work as the camp’s Tätowierer, the person tasked with tattooing a serial number on all camp inmates.

It is under such hellish circumstances that Lale meets Gisela “Gita” Furhmannova, a young woman he knows only by the number he has painfully etched into her arm, and thinks of as the prisoner with the dark brown eyes.