Harvey Keitel lifts uneven Holocaust melodrama The Tattooist of Auschwitz — review

Based on the mega-selling book by New Zealand writer Heather Morris, six-part series The Tattooist of Auschwitz tells the true story of Slovakian Jew and Holocaust survivor Ludwig “Lali” Sokolov, who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 and given a job tattooing identification numbers on prisoners. The role allowed him special privileges — increased rations, private sleeping quarters — and led to him being taken under the wing of volatile SS officer Stefan Baretzki (played in the series by Jonas Nay). It was Baretzki who encouraged Lali’s blossoming love affair with fellow prisoner Gita and provided cover for their trysts. Marrying after the war, the couple relocated to Australia and remained together for 60 years.

Director Tali Shalom-Ezer uses the conversations between Morris (Melanie Lynskey) and the octogenarian Lali (played with brittle sadness by Harvey Keitel) as a framing device for this adaptation. The narrative shifts between the past — we follow young Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) through deportation and imprisonment to liberation — and modern-day Melbourne, where he sits as a widowed old man in his apartment haunted by ghosts from his past.

Care has been taken to show the effects of the trauma: Gita (Anna Próchniak) and Lali’s marriage nearly buckles under the weight of their history, while Lali’s survivor’s guilt is compounded by having benefited from Baretzki’s favouritism. While the series doesn’t shy away from Auschwitz’s brutality and bloodshed, it also makes a point of honouring the dead by pausing the narrative to show colour-saturated stills of murdered characters, an awkward but well-meaning reminder that the camp’s estimated 1.1mn victims were more than the numbers imprinted on their arms.

Yet for a series that bends over backwards to respect its subject matter — it was made with the help of Jewish historian Naomi Gryn — it contains some strange creative decisions. Why does young Lali speak in plummy English tones while Keitel’s Lali has an eastern European accent? And why does our handsome central couple remain dewy-skinned after three years of confinement while their co-stars are caked in dirt? Most baffling are the widescreen shots of Auschwitz-Birkenau which, complete with chimneys belching black smoke and fire, are shonkily rendered in CGI, undermining the efforts at authenticity elsewhere.

In the end, it is Lali and Baretzki’s relationship, rather than the syrupy central romance, that proves most compelling. Freighted with all that remains unspoken, the tension between them comes to a head when Baretzki, preparing to move out before the Red Army arrives, tries to shake Lali’s hand. Saying nothing, Lali turns away and leaves him hanging.

★★★☆☆

On Sky Atlantic/NOW in the UK and Peacock in the US from May 2