En December 2003, Heather Morris was working in the social services of a Melbourne hospital when she met Lale Sokolov – real name Ludwig Eisenberg –, a survivor of the Nazi camps who wanted to share his story with the world. For three years, this novice author will collect the confidences of the octogenarian, a Slovak Jew deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 and forced by his torturers to tattoo identification numbers on his co-prisoners.
In this concentration camp hell, one day he meets the gaze of Gita, with whom he falls madly in love. The love at first sight is mutual, and gives them the strength to resist the unspeakable. From this moving testimony, Heather Morris draws a story which appears in 2017, eleven years after the death of the man who had become “a member of her family”. Criticized for its romantic approach and its historical approximations, The Tattooist of Auschwitz nonetheless sold 14 million copies worldwide.
ALSO READ “Russians at the Auschwitz commemoration? It would be cynical and inappropriate” This best-seller has just been adapted into a mini-series, of which M6 is broadcasting the first two episodes (out of 6) this Wednesday, January 22, to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. A fiction carried by Harvey Keitel and Jonas Hauer-King, among others, which oscillates between past and present, mixing Lale’s memories of Auschwitz with his interviews with Heather Morris sixty years later […] Read more
