In the 1940s, Lali Sokolov met Gita Furman when he tattooed her arm at Auschwitz. The two fell in love, and after liberation, they moved to Australia where they spent the rest of their lives together. Furman didn't want to talk about the Holocaust, so Sokolov didn't, either. After Gita's death in 2003, he told his story to Heather Morris, a non-Jew from New Zealand who didn't know much about the Holocaust. Morris spent three years hearing Sokolov's recollections, and then another ten years trying to option the story as a play. Then she made it into a novel instead. The Tattooist of Auschwitz became a worldwide best seller in 2018.
Although classified as fiction, the book was based on Sokolov's story. Historians from the Shoah Foundation and the the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center, among others, found numerous historical inconsistencies and errors in the account of the tattooist. The story was like a game of telephone, passed from the subject 50 years after the fact, to a young writer with little historical background and no corroboration from Furman. Sokolov died years before the book was published. However, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is far from the only story fictionalized from the Holocaust, and as the generation of survivors disappears, there will only be more.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz premieres today as a six-episode miniseries on Peacock. The TV adaptation addresses the inconsistencies in Sokolov's story by illustrating how he told it to Morris as an elderly man who suppressed those memories for 50 years. Read up on Sokolov's story, the controversial novel, and the TV series The Tattooist of Auschwitz at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: Martin Mlaka/Sky UK)
