Gary Sokolov tried five times to visit Auschwitz – the place not only where he lost family members but also where his parents met and fell in love. Once, he got as far as the Polish border but never made it across.
Only on the fifth time, accompanied by a television camera there to film the only son of the now famous “tattooist of Auschwitz” who found love there, did he finally walk through the gates of hell.
“My knees were shaking, my heart was racing and I walked in and out of the gate four times, I was terrified,” Gary recalls. But, at the age of 64, he decided it was time to come face to face with what his parents had gone through. Time to see what they were too afraid to tell him themselves.
The result was surprising, shocking almost. “I feel like a weight has been lifted from me,” Gary reveals. “I am a happier person. When you walk around with a lack of knowledge about your own parents and grandparents, your aunts and uncles, it’s a very empty feeling. But now I understand.”
The story of how Gary’s parents Lale Sokolov and Gita Fuhrmannova fell in love at Auschwitz has become world famous thanks to a bestselling book called simply The Tattooist of Auschwitz written by Heather Morris, to whom Gary’s father confided in at the end of his life, and a recent Sky television drama based on the book. Now a Sky History documentary features Gary trying to retrace the steps of his parents, visiting the houses they grew up in and the place where they fell in love.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz stars Anna Próchniak (left) and Jonah Hauer-King (second right) with Gary Sokolov and the book's author Heather Morris
It is a story that Gary learnt only from reading the book, as both his Slovakian-born parents refused to talk to him about what they went through during the war. Even now he is still learning. Astonishingly, it was only as he was filming the documentary and meeting a genealogy expert, that he discovered his mother had three sisters who were killed at Auschwitz. She’d never mentioned them to him before.
“They didn’t want me to be aware of the horrors and what they went through,” says Gary. “The only thing my mother really told me about was about how, when she was really sick while she was in Auschwitz, her mother came to her in a dream and said, ‘You will get better, you will move to a faraway country, you are going to meet a man and you are going to have a son.’ That is all she ever told me.
“Dad would tell the occasional story – things like how there were two young men and how he changed their tattoos to help them escape and take their information about Auschwitz to the allies. And I later found a book about the escape and his part in it was mentioned. Apart from that, it was just the odd thing that I would overhear.
Gary Sokolov next to Auschwitz II-Birkenau gatehouse and train tracks
“Growing up in Australia, my parents were friendly with other Slovakian Holocaust survivors. Quite a few of them had come out on the same boat as my parents – three of the women had been tattooed by my father in Auschwitz.
“They’d take turns hosting the Jewish holidays. After a meal, the women would go into the kitchen and talk – about what their kids were going to do when they leave school, who they were going to marry – I would call them the Parliament as they would work everything out. The men would sit around telling stories but my problem was that my Slovak wasn’t very good and they didn’t tell the stories in English. I’d pick up the odd bits and pieces but my parents never wanted to speak about it.”
He knew that his parents had met at Auschwitz and that his father had helped keep his mother alive by smuggling food to her but Gary learned not to ask them more. “My father would pretend not to hear. Or he would just ignore me, and say something like, ‘the soccer starts in five minutes’,” he says. “Sometimes when I would be talking to him, I would look into his eyes and it would be like it wasn’t totally there. It is only really in watching the drama series about him, in which he’s played so well by Jonah Hauer-King, that I realised that in those moments he might be being haunted by his memories. It was through watching the drama that I learned to understand my father better.”
It was similar for his mother. It was reading Morris’s work that meant he learnt what the pair had really experienced in Auschwitz and how that pain had endured. He had no idea that his mother would regularly have nightmares – something that Lale told Morris – until he read it.
The work of a stranger meant that he learnt to understand what was really going on in the minds of his parents. “I was in my mid thirties when my mum showed me she’d had her tattoo removed because she said she couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. It was the first time I’d seen her express this negativity and that’s when I realised my mum had been depressed. The tattoo was too much of a reminder of what she went through.”
Growing up, the closest Gary, a father of three, got to understanding what his parents went through was when they sat him, by himself, in front of the seminal 26-part ITV history show The World at War, which helped introduce what happened in the death camps to the world at large and to Gary.
“I can still picture myself aged 12, watching the show by myself in the television room while my parents sat in the kitchen,” he says. “It would be on a Tuesday night and I was allowed to stay up later than usual. The visions of the bulldozers in the camps moving the bodies and piling them up and up. I thought back to that when I was sitting shiva by myself for my dad – no other family members with me because there was no one else. It was the same sadness, the same loneliness that I had watching The World At War.”
Gary’s parent’s attitude was to always try and look forward, not back. “There were no limitations and they were supportive of everything I did,” says Gary. “We would go skiing, to the beach, they wanted me to try different foods and watch movies with them. My dad’s attitude was PMA – positive mental attitude – and they were really happy people. And so loving. One of my fondest memories is from their 50th anniversary and I watched them still cuddling and holding hands. They were devoted to each other.
“I remember one time my dad’s company went bust and I came home and they were taking away the family car. I walked into our apartment and my mother was singing when we’d just lost everything. I remember asking her, ‘Why are you singing when we are in so much trouble?’ and she looked at me blankly and said, ‘Once you’ve survived something like Auschwitz, when you don’t know if you’re going to wake up in the morning, after that everything is easy. Your father has always protected me, I know he always will. So long as we have our health, we’ll be OK.’”
It was Gary who found Morris – an aspiring writer who worked in a care home – to talk to his father towards the end of his life. Lale wanted to tell his story before he died. At first the story was going to be turned into a film, then Morris wrote the book, which has sold an incredible 17 million copies.
Gary Sokolov in an Auschwitz Birkenau bunker
Although there were rumours of a fall-out, and the book has been criticised for being a novel with fictitious elements brought into it, Gary remains close to Morris and says he will always be grateful for what she has done.
“For me it was disappointing that he never spoke to me about it but, unlike tens of thousands of survivors, he found someone he could speak to that he trusted,” says Gary. “One of the things he asked Heather was, ‘How quickly can you write because my wife is waiting for me.’ He wanted to get his story out.
“And as for the fact that there are historical inaccuracies, all I can say is that it’s not a historical document, its my dad’s memories many years later. The most important thing for me is that this is about a romance in the most horrific circumstances humans have endured. And now my parents – my 4ft 11in mum and 5ft 1in dad – are world famous. For me the focus of this story should be about the fact that bad times end and there is a way of surviving.”
A few weeks before Lale died, he asked Gary to take him back to Auschwitz. The first time he’d even considered returning to Europe since he’d left. “I said to him, ‘You are 89 why do you want to go back now?’” Lale, who had a privileged position among the death camp’s Jewish hierarchy, felt all kinds of guilt. “He said he wanted to go back because he wanted to apologise to all the people whose lives he couldn’t save,” says Gary. “He did, five weeks later, and it was my biggest regret that I didn’t jump on a plane with him and take him there. So, for me this trip to Auschwitz was an apology to him and for him.”
The Tattooist’s Son: Journey to Auschwitz is on Sky History on January 27
