The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris
The Tattooist of Auschwitz tells the story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew imprisoned in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Soon after his arrival at the concentration camp he is recruited to tattoo the identification numbers on his fellow prisoners' arms, hundreds every day as more and more people arrive. This role, with the precarious relative power it brings, gives Lale a unique perspective on the atrocities of the concentration camp. What's amazing about this story is that it really happened. Lale Sokolov was a real person, a Holocaust survivor, and this book is his life story. It's quite unlike anything I've read before.
Heather Morris met Lale Sokolov in 2003. She had been invited to listen to him talk about his life, so that she could tell his story. What emerged from their conversations, she muses, was a 'piecemeal' and non-chronological recount, which grew as she listened into something remarkable. Morris collected Lale's memories, painful and harrowing yet astonishingly hopeful, and stitched them together into this narrative. What we end up with is an incredible tale of unwavering hope amidst unspeakable horrors, through the eyes of a man who survived to share it. There exist many books about the Holocaust, but none quite like this.
There are some horrors in this book. The sadist SS guard Baretski, who supervises Lale, is a recurring figure of appalling violence and misogyny. The hard labour the prisoners are subjected to is sickening: pointlessly lugging boulders across the turf until they fall from exhaustion, killed for giving up. The frequency of people being needlessly shot to death is abhorrent. It was, at many moments, very difficult to read. The vivid rendering of the pain and the dialogue is all the more horrifying because we know these episodes are genuine recollections.
Yet the pervading feeling throughout the whole book is amazingly not one of horror but of hope. From the opening page, Lale is committed to getting out of Auschwitz alive, and he approaches everything he faces with an unshakeable confidence that he will achieve this. His position as Tatowierer affords him relative power: he sleeps in different quarters, is protected by a personal guard, and has slightly more freedom to move around the camp. Although this creates a fascinating moral trap wherein he is viewed by his peers as a Nazi collaborator, Lale uses his position to his advantage, smuggling the valuables of the murdered in exchange for food. He keeps many others alive and receives life-changing favours in return.
Lale displays astonishing ingenuity and wit to mastermind such schemes in such circumstances, but what shines even brighter is his love. Lale is a kind man, whose actions are frequently selfless and generous. And, incredibly, his story is a romance: Lale has an eye for beauty and a knack for chivalry, and rapidly falls head over heels for his fellow prisoner Gita. I won't give away the full details of what happens to the pair, but it's a profound portrait of the potency of human love even in the most awful of settings.
There is no question, then, that the story of this book was excellent. The prose, however, had me slightly less convinced. Morris's prose style is very sparse throughout. The whole thing is in the present tense; the language is simple with little to no imagery; most things are stated or reported rather than implied or evoked. It reads very informatively: the epilogue summarising what happened to Lale after the end of the narrative is not much different in tone and style from the text itself. I couldn't help finding it a bit stilted. The prose was boring. But in a way, this starkness of language was also rather effective. The absence of any literary frills meant that the story spoke entirely for itself. Nothing was aestheticised or obscured behind metaphor; the straightforward reporting style made it impossible to forget that this was a recount of reality. Morris's art, after all, is not literary craftsmanship, but faithfulness of retelling. I'll be quick to add that artful language does not by default detract from authenticity - but in this book, Morris's literary achievement lies in the fact that she has pieced together this narrative from fragments so that it can be accessed by all. Not that she has spun it cleverly, but that she has given Lale a voice.
Overall, I'm so glad I read this. I am in awe of Lale Sokolov, and his endurance, grit, resourcefulness and kindness through such horrific trials. The simplicity of Morris's prose did irk me, but perhaps there is no more fitting way to express the atrocities of the Holocaust than with plainness. In stringing together Lale's story, The Tattooist of Auschwitz achieved a very special literary feat. An important book.
