TV Review: The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a valuable — but slow — reminder of the Holocaust
Harvey Keitel as the older Lale Sokolov and Melanie Lynskey as Heather Morris in The Tattooist of Auschwitz
(Sky Atlantic and NOW) is a bit disappointing.
That’s hard to write, there is value in anything reminding us humans are capable of mechanised mass murder.
But injecting drama and intrigue into a story about the Holocaust is tricky because we all know what happened. And this show doesn’t manage it in the opening episode.
The pace is too slow. Maybe it’s because they stayed faithful to the book based on the true-life story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew who ended up as a tattooist in Auschwitz, inking ID numbers on his fellow prisoners.
The story is told here in flashback, with Harvey Keitel playing the older Sokolov, and Jonah Hauer-King the younger version who ended up in the death camp after volunteering to be the one member of his household to work there, to comply with a Slovakian law aimed at persecuting the Jews.
There is a sense of horror when an old school friend, now in the police, warns him to run rather than get on the train to Poland.
He doesn’t and ends up on a hellish train ride, crammed in and standing with his fellow ‘volunteers’. It’s a gruesome reminder that murderous anti-Semitism wasn’t confined to Germany in 20th-century Europe.
Things get progressively worse in the work camp. Inmates stacked like cattle in bunk beds, a dread of getting sick, murderous guards, random violence, executions, the horrible flip-side of civilisation.
Sokolov is given a chance to survive when he’s chosen as a tattooist for the incoming inmates. He takes it, and Keitel’s older Sokolov is haunted by the fact that he colluded with the Nazis to save his life.
This unfolds without any great drama or surprise. The Nazis are bad, the inmates are terrified and humiliated by what they have become. There isn’t much character development either and the scenes where older Sokolov talks to the ghosts of guards and inmates feel like a gimmick.
The point of the story arrives at the end of the first episode. Sokolov is tattooing a number onto a new inmate, Gita, when she comments on the colour of his eyes. There is chemistry of sorts between them and The Tattooist of Auschwitz finally has a story to tell.
Jonah Hauer-King has an intriguing face, but it’s a bit too watery to give emotional heft to the younger Sokolov. I could sit and watch Harvey Keitel all day, there is a whole movie in every facial expression, but he’s not given enough to do here.
This six-parter is a valuable reminder of how civilisation can collapse. But it lacks the energy and intrigue to get me back for a second episode.
