'Tattooist of Auschwitz' review: Holocaust drama skillfully blends fact, fiction

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Holocaust survivor Lali Sokolov (Jonah Hauer-King as the young Lali, Harvey Keitel as the elder), a Slovokian Jew, migrated to Australia after the war, and following the death of his wife Gita Furman (Anna Próchniak), decided to tell their story to novice author Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey). Morris learns that after arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, Lali was made a “tätowierer” — tattooist — charged with tattooing the arms of prisoners, including one, Gita, with whom he fell in love. To get a love note to Gita — and ultimately to survive himself — Lali also had to forge ties with a psychotic SS officer, Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay). Gita and Lali escaped the camp in the closing months of the war — Gita, during a forced march to another camp, and Lali, who was part of a work crew — only to reunite months later, then marry. Gita died in 2003, Lali in 2006.

This six-parter is based on Morris' mostly-true 2018 bestseller of the same name.

MY SAY The first red flag, if that's the right term, appears right at the outset of each episode: " … some elements [have been] fictionalized for dramatic purposes.” Which ones, and more to the point, why? Of any story, in any war, in the vast span of recorded human history, surely none is less in need of heightening for “dramatic purposes” than Auschwitz. When Elie Wiesel famously observed that “a novel about Treblinka is either not a novel or it's not about Treblinka,” that is essentially what he meant. To fictionalize anything would be to subtract from the truth — and the truth, after all, could speak eloquently enough for itself.

But (of course) there's been a whole industry devoted to Holocaust fiction on page and screen, and a subgenre to Auschwitz. “Tattooist” is part of that tradition and can hardly be faulted for what others have done before, except that this is also a memoir which presents another curve: Should Holocaust memoirs have fictional elements too? (“Tattooist's” publisher, HarperCollins, classified it as a novel.)

After “Tattooist” became a worldwide bestseller in 2018, Australian journalist Christine Kenneally raised these flags, first for a magazine, The Monthly, then in a “Reader's Notebook” column in The New York Times in which she conceded that “this unlikely love story is … mostly true.” Nevertheless, either Morris or Sokolov got various critical details wrong, she said. The most puzzling of those — Gita's tattoo number, casting doubt on the pivotal scene where she and Lali meet in both movie and book. Kenneally reasonably (or rhetorically) wondered, “Is there a greater imperative for novels about an event as catastrophic as the Holocaust to get basic facts right?”

This six-parter sidesteps the factual blips with that title card caveat, which also stipulates that it's “inspired” by the book. Moreover, Lali did indeed have ties with an SS officer, although Hauer-King's performance is so guileless, it's hard to ever imagine how. Mostly though, “Tattooist” projects Lali as an unreliable narrator, or at least a not-consistently reliable one, whose battles with PTSD take the form of ghosts from the distant past. “I want to tell the truth,” he says bitterly, “but what is the truth? How can I know what is right?”

Or how can we? At least “Tattooist” seems to get some of the other basics right. By way of a warning, those can be hard to watch, as if they could be otherwise.

BOTTOM LINE Skillful, at times powerful, blend of fact with fiction — and not always clear which is which.