Tattooist of Auschwitz arrives on screen and doesn’t shy from the book’s controversy

The Tattooist of Auschwitz, Stan from May 2
★★★½

An opening title card tells us The Tattooist of Auschwitz is “based on the memories of Holocaust survivor Lali Sokolov”. And then the words fade away, leaving just “the memories of Lali Sokolov”.

It’s a simple but clever device that points to a theme that will surface again and again over its six episodes: the reliability or otherwise of its narrator, and the memories he chooses to confront and avoid (and his motives for doing so) as he recounts his tale.

Lali (played as a young man by English actor Jonah Hauer-King) leaves his hometown in Slovakia in 1942, bound, he thinks, for work in a German factory. He winds up instead in Auschwitz, where he faces starvation, freezing cold, and the random acts of violence that might see a prisoner shot while using an outdoor latrine simply because a guard thought it would be a laugh.

The line between life and death is inconceivably thin. Work as a tattooist who pricks numbers into the left arm of each newly arrived prisoner offers a marginally better chance of survival, and Lali snatches it. He might be collaborating with the SS, but it gives him access to a room of his own, better food, the opportunity to smuggle and trade. It is, in short, a lifeline.

When he inks Gita (Polish actress Anna Prochniak), their connection is instantaneous, intense and enduring. Alongside the horrors of life in the camp, their love story is the spine of this tale.

The framing device is the sessions between aspiring writer Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey) and the 87-year-old Lali (Harvey Keitel) at his home in Melbourne. He wants someone to write his story; she tells him she has done a six-week course in memoir and biography. She declines to take notes – “I think I’d just like to listen,” she tells him – and they’re off.

Morris’ book, which in fact began life as a screenplay, has sold millions of copies since its publication in 2018 and has been translated into dozens of languages. But despite being framed and heavily promoted as a “true story”, it has been mired in controversy over accusations of inaccuracy since it emerged.