Love leaves a permanent mark for author of The Tattooist Of Auschwitz

FOR more than two decades Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov has been an omnipresent figure in the life of New Zealand-Australian author Heather Moore.

Her 2018 debut novel, The Tattooist Of Auschwitz, was written from the three years she spent recording Sokolov's experience of surviving the hellish Nazi concentration camp in Poland during the Second World War, before his death in 2006 aged 90.

The Tattooist Of Auschwitz, while criticised for some historical inaccuracies which were later amended, was a global best-seller. It's sold more than 13 million copies worldwide.

Sokolov's powerful story of finding love with his wife, Gisela "Gita" Fuhrmannova in Auschwitz has now been adapted for the TV screen.

Academy Award-nominee Harvey Keitel (Pulp Fiction, Taxi Driver, The Piano) plays an elderly Sokolov as he reveals his story to Morris, who at the time was a nurse who dreamt of becoming a writer.

Morris, who was a story consultant for the TV series, said Keitel's portrayal of Sokolov left her in tears.

"I went from that, 'oh gosh here's a man I spent three years sitting in front of', to being confronted by Harvey Keitel's portrayal of him," Morris said. "That was incredibly emotional for me.

"Leaving aside the whole story and how it's come about, I was impacted immediately in that opening scene by Harvey.

"I watched three episodes in one day and three more on the next. That was enough. It was exhausting. It was beautiful.

"I probably cried more watching that than the birth of my kids."

To prepare for the role Keitel asked for Morris' videos of Sokolov and on set in the Slovakian capital of Bratislava he asked further questions about his mannerisms.

"He took it all on board and it plays out," she said. "He is simply amazing in giving me back the Lale I knew."

Morris said the process of allowing Sokolov to reveal his entire story for the first time from 2003 to 2006 helped unburden him from decades of survivors guilt. But, at all times, the trauma was still fresh.

"I could see him changing," she said. "I would see him go down that very dark path of not being present in the room with me anymore.

"I would see the glazed look in his eyes and see him look beyond me and I'm three feet in front of him.

"He was back there in that horrible and evil place.

"But it did become a cathartic experience for him. He became that lighter person."

The Tattooist Of Auschwitz tells the story of an 87-year-old Slovak-Australian Sokolov, who is overwhelmed with grief following the death of his wife Gita.

At the gentle coaxing of Morris, played by Melanie Lynskey (Yellowjackets, The Last Of Us), Sokolov begins to confront his survival guilt and the horrors of Auschwitz, where he worked tattooing numbers on new Jewish prisoners.

Yet amongst this environment of death and brutality, Sokolov finds love with a young Slovak girl, Gita, who he becomes infatuated with after tattooing her arm.

"I tattooed her number on her left arm, she tattooed her number in my heart," he said.

When Morris was approached to make a TV adaptation of The Tattooist Of Auschwitz, there was one important piece of the story that was non-negotiable.

"The thing I was absolutely adamant about, and there was no issue with, was the depiction of Lale and Gita had to be how I had recorded it in the book as given to me by Lale," she said.

"I couldn't allow their characters to be anything that they weren't, that I knew of.

"They couldn't do anything that could be made up or created for the purposes of the adaptation and the visual interpretation."

The Tattooist Of Auschwitz is screening on Stan.