Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Heather Morris, Echo Publishing, $29.99.
Painstaking investigations have gone into the compilation of this love story of Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov and Gita. It’s an unbelievable account of the Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist and the woman he loved.
Based on a true story of survival and devotion during the Holocaust, it is a narrative full of beauty and hope and the result of years of interviews conducted by Morris with Sokolov and research in Germany and Poland.
In the camp, Lale was looked up to, looked out for, and put to work in the privileged position of tätowierer – the tattooist – to mark his fellow prisoners, forever.
In one of the most atrocious of places, love bloomed in July 1942: Lale, prisoner 32407, comforted a young girl, named Gita, while he tattooed the number 34902 on her arm. She in turn, tattooed her affection on his heart for all time.
For more than 50 years they kept their prison romance to themselves, surviving a death march, being separated, reunited and then getting married and living happily in Melbourne for 58 years.
The ‘horrors of surviving nearly three years in a concentration camp left them with a lifetime of fear and paranoia. It was only after Gita’s death that Lale would speak of this time, and asked me to record the incredible story of the beginning of their life together’.
Their life comprises an amazing array of emotions: not only is it astonishing, but also poignant, frustrating and elevating.
It’s been attributed as being a story about the “extremes of human behaviour: calculated brutality alongside impulsive and selfless acts of love”.
It can also be regarded as carrying a quality of a “dark fairytale … both simple and epic, shot through with compassion and love”.
