The Tattooist of Auschwitz is controversial, but is historical accuracy more important than awareness?
- Written by Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW Sydney
This month, the much-anticipated television adaptation of The Tattooist of Auschwitz premiered on Australian streaming platform Stan. Before its release, significant publicity announced it as an all-star production: Melanie Lynsky and Academy Award nominee Harvey Keitel in leading roles; an original score by Academy Award winner Hans Zimmer; an original song written and sung by Barbara Streisand. The series has been applauded as a “courageous, unforgettable, human story” and as both “a love story and reminder of the Holocaust and its horrors”.
The book on which the series is based was published in 2018 by the Australia-based, New Zealand-born author Heather Morris. The Tattooist of Auschwitz has been translated into more than 40 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide. It tells the story of Ludwig “Lali” Sokolov (né Eisenberg), as recounted to Morris over three years of personal meetings.
Harvey Keitel as Lali Sokolov in The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Stan Originals
The danger of trivialisation
The audience is constantly reminded that The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a love story. Such is the focus on the love between Lali and Gita that the complex history of the Holocaust comes dangerously close to functioning as a well-recognised mise-en-scène. The striped uniforms, box cars, barracks, abuse, starvation and death form the backdrop to a story of courage and hope with a redemptive, triumphal ending.
The educational value of the history is, in this way, subordinated to entertainment. But what if such fictionalised blockbusters, simplified though they are, do more for Holocaust awareness than meticulously researched Holocaust documentaries?
The Auschwitz Memorial complained that after the publication of Morris’ book, visitors began to ask for special tours in the footsteps of the tattooist. Did the book bring them to the museum? Isn’t this the role popular culture should play? Its job is not primarily to educate, but to raise awareness and generate interest that will lead people to educate themselves.
Criticism of popularised Holocaust representations is certainly not new. The debate has been active since the late 1970s, when it was provoked by the premiere of the CBS television miniseries Holocaust: The Story of Family Weiss (1978). The series was based on reality, but was essentially a soap opera, a Hollywood version of events with many inaccuracies.
Some Holocaust scholars and survivors were offended at the trivialisation, arguing that the Holocaust was a singular event, beyond representation. Famous Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel stated:
Auschwitz cannot be explained, nor can it be visualised. The Holocaust transcends history. […] The Holocaust [is] the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who were there know what it was, the others will never know.
But there were those who disagreed. The miniseries brought the Holocaust to audiences well beyond scholars. It made the history broadly accessible for the first time. Showing that history, even with inaccuracies, allowed audiences to begin to construct their own understandings and meanings of a complex past. This may lead to the conclusion that it is better to show something of the Holocaust, an approximation of what happened, than nothing at all.
The impact of the Holocaust miniseries cannot be understated. Half a billion people worldwide viewed it. It allegedly encouraged a Papal visit to Auschwitz, contributed to the creation of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust (leading to the opening of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993), and encouraged Germany to extend the statute of limitations on war criminals.
Many film scholars credit the miniseries with pushing cinematic representations of the Holocaust forward, for better or worse. Major films followed, including Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, which proved equally divisive. They were critically acclaimed, but criticised for stereotyping, inappropriate use of humour, and presenting love stories against a backdrop of death.
At the climax of the first episode of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, when the audience is finally rewarded with seeing the young lovers meet, “romantic music swells on the soundtrack and, as they temporarily part, they both smile. For half a second, we almost forget where we are”.
Is this a trivialisation or a distraction from the reality of history? Does the love story serve as misdirection or mediation that moves us away from the totality and reality of the Holocaust? Or does it perhaps provide an entrance point – a recognisable narrative device that allows audiences to engage with the Holocaust, at least in some way?
Stories in which love and courage triumph over the ultimate evil may be problematic, but they don’t discourage audiences from watching them in the way a more brutal depiction might. And is this not the overarching imperative? Never look away? Never again?
Auschwitz.
Dieglop, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Trauma and the ambiguity of survival
Responding to the premiere of the television series, the Auschwitz Memorial was quick to release another statement. It emphasised that “immortal love” would not be enough for Lali and Gita to survive almost three years in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Both were lucky to get lighter job assignments, which meant they did not have to labour in the fields, exposed to the elements and brutal kapos.
The book and television series both raise the uncomfortable issue of privileged prisoners in Auschwitz, Lali among them. The SS created a hierarchy, which gave functions to some of the prisoners in exchange for better working and living conditions. Lali, as a tattooist, had his own private room and better food. According to the book and series, he even developed a close, albeit strange, relationship with one of the SS men, Stefan Baretzki. “To me he was like a brother,” Lali said in his USC Shoah Foundation interview in 1996.
These scenes were criticised as unrealistic. But others have noted that close though bizarre relationships could develop between the SS and veteran prisoners. Morris, for example, includes a story about a football game between a prisoner team (headed by Lali) and the SS.
This scene was omitted from the series. Yet in his famous essay The Gray Zone in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), Primo Levi, a prominent voice among Holocaust survivors, mentions a similar game between the SS and the Sonderkommando, a Jewish unit that operated the crematoria. For Levi, this was the ultimate example of inhumanity and the “most demonic plan” of the SS: “we have embraced you, corrupted you, dragged you to the bottom with us”.
Primo Levi (1919-1987).
Monozigote, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Lali is troubled by his status as a privileged prisoner who works for the “Politische Abteilung” (Camp Gestapo): “I can only hope I am one day not judged as a perpetrator or collaborator.”
These scenes, and the trauma depicted in the series, remind us about the difficult histories of the Holocaust, and of survival in extremis. Survivors, such as Lali and Gita, carried the burden of survival for the rest of their lives.
While Holocaust film and popular literature production has not stagnated, the debate launched in the 1970s appears to be at an impasse. Morris’s book and its television adaptation show that the interest in representing this aspect of the human experience, ultimately to achieve the goal of entertaining and captivating audiences, shows no signs of abating.
If we accept this, perhaps it is the responsibility of educational institutions, museums and memorials to use these productions as learning opportunities – certainly providing correctives where necessary, but most of all maintaining critical engagement with an audience who has already shown a willingness to engage with the Holocaust in some way.
Authors: Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW Sydney
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