‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’: A New Holocaust Drama That Couldn’t Be Timelier

The Holocaust is the wound that never heals because the hate that fueled it is always here, and one need only look and listen today—with Jews persecuted and demonized at home and abroad, and with vehement calls for their expulsion and extermination as commonplace as they were in the 1930s and 1940s—to be reminded that antisemitism is the world’s eternal ugliness. Thus, Peacock’s six-part limited series The Tattooist of Auschwitz arrives at a particularly auspicious moment. Inspired by both Heather Morris’ best-selling 2018 book and the memories of its main character, it’s a stirring tribute to the perseverance of one man and, by extension, to all who survived the horrors of Hitler’s genocide, and who were rewarded for their triumph with a lifetime of pain, guilt, heartache, and ghosts that refuse to go quietly into the terrible night.

Spearheaded by director Tali Shalom Ezer and writer Jacquelin Perske, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, which premieres May 2, is, in several ways, a familiar tale refracted through a novel lens, and at times, its framing device proves a tad clunky. Nonetheless, such intermittent gracelessness is overshadowed by the proceedings’ complexity, poignancy, and horror. In Melbourne, Australia circa 2003, hospital worker Heather (Melanie Lynskey) visits the apartment of Lali Sokolov (Harvey Keitel), a widower and Holocaust survivor to whom she’s been referred by a friend. Lali wants someone to pen his life story and Heather is an aspiring writer. Despite not being Jewish or having any first-hand relationship with the atrocities of WWII, she agrees to the task, sitting with Lali in his sunlit living room as he slowly recounts his unthinkable ordeal.

That begins in 1942 Slovakia, where twentysomething Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) hears that one member of each Jewish household must report to the authorities for work duty. Lali volunteers and is promptly loaded into an overcrowded train and transported to Auschwitz II—Birkenau, the most infamous of the Third Reich’s numerous concentration camps. Upon arriving, he displays courage to the man tasked with giving him his forearm number, and following a nearly fatal illness from which he recovers thanks to his friend’s bravery, he lucks into a job as a tattooist. Through this assignment, he eventually meets Gita (Anna Próchniak), and it’s love at first sight. Amour doesn’t blossom easily in this environment, however, and their ensuing attempts to forge a bond, and to help keep each other alive, involves compromises and choices of a dreadful sort, many of them enabled by a sociopathic Nazi guard named Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay) who takes Lali under his wing.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is about the ghastly price of enduring, as Lali (like so many of his comrades) is first victimized by the Nazis and then turned into a victimizer, which itself is merely another form of victimization. At every turn, the innocent are decried, defiled, and forced to become complicit in their own oppression and slaughter, and the series refuses to shy away from the intricacies of Auschwitz’s power dynamics. Guards have no problem shooting people in the head with zero provocation while simultaneously forming self-serving (if twistedly sincere) bonds with their prisoners, just as Jews are compelled to collaborate, to steal and plunder, and to support and betray in order to make it to the following day. There’s no light here, only the dismal, bloody muck of a hellhole from which there’s no apparent escape.

In its flashbacks, The Tattooist of Auschwitz presents an authentically harrowing vision of Holocaust torment and triumph, and the myriad ways in which individuals survived through concession, retaliation, self-suppression, and hope—the last of which, in Lali’s case, was bolstered by his love for the equally strong Gita. Creating a natural dialogue between then and now, the series burrows into the shame, remorse, fury, and sorrow of Lali’s trauma, and if Keitel’s dialogue is sometimes a tad blunt, the actor embodies the elderly character as a boundless reservoir of anguish. Similarly, Lynskey is saddled with an embarrassing wig that makes her look like she belongs in Scooby Doo, but she boasts a comfortable rapport with her co-star, and their scenes together are enhanced by the specters who routinely haunt Lali as he tries to relay his experiences—and, in some cases, to imagine them in more comforting terms.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz rests on the fine performances of Hauer-King and Próchniak as the younger Lali and Gita, whose agony lasted for years after their escape from Auschwitz (and, then, the Red Army). It additionally features various piercing details—a carpenter shruggingly copping to doing the devil’s work; a gay prisoner suffering an unthinkable medical-experiment punishment; Gita memorizing a love letter from Lali and then disposing of it by using it as toilet paper—that are as heartrending as the more conventional sights of Nazi inhumanity, of which there are many. Heroic sacrifice and selfless risk-taking are also common facets of Lali and Gita’s saga, providing an inspiring counterpoint to the psychotic sadism of Hitler’s minions, here epitomized by Stefan, whom Nay inhabits as a villain whose dangerous sociopathy stems from his pitiful weakness and insecurity.

There are sporadic occasions when The Tattooist of Auschwitz might have benefited from slightly greater nuance, most of them having to do with Keitel and Lynskey. Yet the series surmounts its minor speedbumps via its unvarnished portrait of survival as a mission that often requires impossible acts of kindness and cruelty. Shot with a bracing sobriety that does justice to the lives that were lost and torn apart by the Holocaust, it demonstrates respect for its subject by refusing to sugarcoat any aspect of its story, including the complicated feelings of its protagonist, whose narration is often halted by silent close-up images—in his mind, and on screen—of the countless people denied the freedom they craved, and deserved.

The faces of the dead are everywhere in The Tattooist of Auschwitz, and their cold, sorrowful stares feel like judgements as well as pleas—to Lali and to us—to remember, to honor, and to learn from, so that such a nightmare never happens again. In our alarming antisemitic present, it’s a warning that resounds with the utmost urgency.