The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

October 14, 2019

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris

In 1942, Lale (Ludwig) Eisenberg is deported from Slovakia to the Auschwitz-Birgenau concentration camp.  He begins as a laborer, but when the camp authorities learn that he speaks several language, he is put to work as assistant tattooist, tattooing numbers on newly arrived prisoners.  Mostly he keeps his head down but it becomes more difficult when he is required to starting tattooing numbers on young women, especially when he meets a girl named Gita, also from Slovakia.  One day, his friend the tattooist Pepan disappears and Lale finds himself “promoted” to head tattooist, a position that comes with better living quarters and extra food rations.  Despite his resolution to keep his head down and survive, after observing the guards’ brutality to the prisoners, Lale resolves to do all he can to help and protect Gita, his assistant Leon, and other friends in the camp.

It took me a while to get around to reading this one.  There have been so many books recently about World War II, with a lot of them focusing on the concentration camps (Mischling by Affinity Konar and Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly, to name just two), and let's be honest, it's a depressing topic.  But it is an important topic.  Like so many novels about World War II, this novel is painful to read, but it is also full of hope.  Lale is determined to survive and doggedly plans a future for himself, inspiring others along the way to believe that they too will endure and come out of the camp alive.  I would have liked to know what happened to Leon, Cilka, Jakub, and others, but it fits with the story that there are loose ends.  So many were displaced in the war and lost in the camps that people just disappeared and their loved ones never found out what happened to them.  (Morris recently published a sequel, Cilka's Journey, which is almost pure fiction according to the real Cilka's family.)

There has been a certain amount of controversy about the historical basis of the story, including an error in the number assigned to Gita, the unavailability of penicillin in 1943, and the nature of the experiments that Mengele performed on prisoners.  As some of the Holocaust organizations and museums have pointed out, it is a novel based on one person's memories and recollections, and shouldn't be taken as historical fact.  That doesn't make it any less compelling to read.