First of all, let me emphasise that this truly is a noble book. Really, I mean it. I’m not being facetious. Even though I’m about to embark upon a few critical thoughts, I still fervently maintain that this is a noble book. And for that reason alone, I say Hats off to the author, Heather Morris. If I were either Lale or Gita – her true-life protagonists – I would be smiling down from heaven now, in the wake of their novel’s success and their subsequent promotion to eternal fame and immortality.
Did you notice that I just said their novel’s success? That wasn’t accidental. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is their novel. Their love and survival story. They met at Auschwitz-Birkenau when very young, fell in love, managed to survive against all odds, married after the liberation, and lived a long and happy life together. All the details of their daily ordeals during their incarceration, as well as the ordeals of other inmates, make for interesting reading. Everyone has heard about Auschwitz (I, for one, living in Krakow, have visited it several times), but none of us has actually experienced it, obviously. This book gives us a kind of ‘insider knowledge’ – though only to a certain extent, I have to say, because I never felt that the true horror of Auschwitz was sufficiently conveyed. Nonetheless, due to the author’s meticulous research and interviews with the elderly Lale before his death in 2006, we do learn some previously unknown details. Both Lale and Gita are dead now, but their memory will certainly live on. This book is a homage to them, and to others who experienced the living hell of concentration camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau; places that none of us, 74 years on, can truly imagine. It is only via the conduit of literature that we can try to comprehend at least a fraction of its reality.
So on that count alone, this book was worth writing. The trouble is, when dealing with subject matter as grave as wartime survival, especially when the main characters really existed, it almost feels crass to cast aspersions on the writing itself. I feel guilty offering any niggling criticisms, so I won’t even bother going into detail about why, for me, the style didn’t quite work. I suppose all I can say is that the novel was more like a chronicle, because we learned a lot of facts and, knowing that it was closely based on those facts, we were were able to learn that inmates still found the energy to experience human emotions such as romantic love, given that dehumanisation is what the Nazi camps were all about. Hence the tattoos.
If Lale’s testimony, narrated by Heather Morris, is to be believed, then such experiences apparently were indeed possible. That’s what astounded me. But I have to say I found the characters somewhat wooden, the style very simplistic, and, moreover, a certain intangible element missing. Considering the emotional power such a story should have conveyed, I never once felt deeply moved while reading, which just goes to show how crucial the stylistic element of any work of literature is, regardless of the story content.
I did, however, feel touched when reading the author’s postscripts, which constituted quite a number of additional pages. The account of her journey to Lale’s hometown of Krompachy in Slovakia, and the reception she received there, was certainly heart-warming. It gave me a real sense of the determination of this woman; a writer who has taken Lale and Gita’s story to heart and gone to great lengths to try to make it come alive again.
Wendy Skorupski 