Lali Sokolov’s story was a heartfelt and engaging journey, though certain factual inconsistencies mean that Heather Morris’ The Tattooist of Auschwitz becomes somewhat flawed in its presentation.
The novel is about Lali Sokolov (that’s right, his name is misspelled in the book) and explores how he used his wits to help his fellow prisoners and fall in love with Gita, his future wife. This could have been an invaluable document for the greater public as the only surviving account of a Jewish prisoner employed as a tattooist within Auschwitz; but alas, this is not the case. For a novel that is claiming to capture an accurate depiction of life within Aushwitz’s walls, Morris does an almost careless job of fact-checking Sokolov’s memories. For instance, Gisela Furman, the woman for whom this book revolves around, was not tattooed with number in the novel, 3490, but rather 4562. Another example is that Lali could not have been transported through Ostrava and Pszczyna to the camp during this time; and the work unit where Lali worked was supervised by SS-Oberscharfuhrer Josef Hustek-Erber, not Stefan Baretski. There are many more besides these, of course, but this is a review and not a list of mistakes. You could say that these are trivial discrepancies, and maybe they are, but I believe these key issues do throw doubt into a lot of what is being said.
But if we were to ignore these issues and look at this as a tale of a man struggling for love and survival in a place where neither of these thrived, then I believe it to be an engaging read. I was captivated by Lali’s story and Morris wastes no time in exploring the man’s mind, but she uses the horrors of the holocaust as more of a backdrop to the overall story, dipping in out and out almost casually, as if to remind us that this was indeed a horrible place. That is to say I felt rather distant to the harrowing conditions that I knew Auschwitz had because I was spending so much time with the saccharine romance between Lali and Gita. And that, I think, is the biggest shame here.
Verdict:
Whilst I found Lali’s story to be an engaging one, Morris’s telling seemed to gloss over a lot of what I believed to be very important issues. I understand that there are a lot of documents and stories already out there depicting these atrocitities, but I still don’t feel that a reader should be distanced from them. Perhaps this was an account better suited to non-fiction than fiction. The factual discrepencies, of which there were many, simply could not be overlooked.
6/10
I am constantly looking for ways to improve my own writing, so if I have missed something off this post (or indeed if there is something wrong with any of my posts) please let me know. Thanks for reading!
The Writer's Block 