From the outset, The Tattooist of Auschwitz sets itself up as a fiction of sorts. Like its source material, Heather Morris' novel, the show follows the real-life story of Lale Solokov – who, as you might have intuited, was responsible for tattooing the infamous numbers on his fellow prisoners' arms.
The introductory text hammers the fallibility of memory home, while also paying respect to its inspiration, by reminding us that the film is based on the book which is based on the 'memory of Lale Solokov' – the final four words we see before the show begins.
What the show also seeks to do is show us not only the story itself but how the telling of it came to be. We meet Heather Morris, a non-Jewish Australian healthcare worker with dreams of being a writer, played by Melanie Lynskey.
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She is sweet and patient with the aged Lale, played with taut, subtle rage by Harvey Keitel, whose memories seem to be playing tricks even on him. Through Lale telling Heather about his time in the death camps, and how he met the love of his life there, we too experience young Lale's time, in all its brutality.
As the press material reminds us over, and over, and over, the show is about "finding love in the darkest of places" (cue Rihanna); unfortunately, the glimmers of this deep, intimate, and almost impossible love feel contrived at best.
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Gita, a one-note Auschwitz Mary-Sue, played by a wasted Anna Próchniak, falls in love seemingly overnight with Lale (played by Jonah Hauer-King, whose stamina and ability at making Lale seem at least slightly complex deserves commendation).
The desperate need to find intimacy, physical and emotional, in a place like Auschwitz was left unexplored, supplanted by a point-for-point rendition of Lale's remembered experiences as told in the book.
Setting aside the veracity of some of Lale and Gita's specific experiences (which is a whole other can of worms), their story – which is emotionally and contextually true, even if it isn't necessarily factually so – feels like a barrage of maudlin, unyielding torment.
This is, in some ways, the fundamental crux of telling Holocaust stories. They are brutal. They can so easily become 'trauma porn' because they were deeply, enduringly traumatic. The best storytellers, however, know how to balance this with something – anything; humour, affection, sarcasm, or scheming, to name a few.
Unfortunately, director Tali Shalom Ezer and writer Jacquelin Perske rest the show's emotional weight in the brutality of the camps. We see glimpses of complex emotional crises (a prisoner about to be hanged screaming 'I'm free' before he plunges to his death) but those moments aren't allowed to linger. We, as viewers, have no chance to absorb their nuance because the show hurtles along to the next beating.
Similarly, the strained, but beneficial, relationship between Lale and Nazi guard Stefan Baretzki (played by Deutschland 83, 86, and 89's eerily compelling Jonas Nay) is only explored in the final episode. It is hinted throughout that this is what haunts Lale the most – how close he grew to a Nazi, how useful they were to each other not just practically but emotionally. However, even this sole interesting narrative choice peters out at the end in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it emotional non-climax.
If this was an attempt at immersive storytelling, in which viewers are subjected to atrocities at the same breakneck pace as the real prisoners, it fails. We learn nothing about the inner lives of the prisoners in the moment; all we have is Lale's memories, the way he analyses in hindsight what he, what they all, suffered.
Because of this the nuance of life in the camps becomes flattened, and so we can't see the spots of light that allowed love to blossom, organically, slowly, like a blade of grass through concrete. Everything feels forced and therefore offers no contrast to the bleakness.
In 'the present day', which is in fact around 2005, though it's hard to tell based on the production design, Heather is a recipient for Lale's pain and it becomes clear that what Lale really needs is a therapist, not a novelist.
Lynskey does her best to round out a flat – let's say it – uninspired character, imbuing her with a kind of late-blooming-ingenue energy whose talents we, unfortunately, never see come to fruition. Her sole purpose in the show is as a vehicle for Lale's story.
If Lale and Heather's meetings, of which there were many until Lale's death in 2006, had offered more fruitful narrative beats, it would be worth adapting into the TV show. But it instead is a perfunctory attempt at not making 'another Holocaust show' by foregrounding it in contemporary times.
Related: Hunters' final season is a triumphant end despite its flaws
On the other side of the spectrum, we have the criminally misunderstood Hunters. The show is firmly footed in the '70s, but each episode opens with a flashback to the camps – something that the show's main character Jonah Heidelbaum (played with frenetic energy by Logan Lerman) – wouldn't have experienced but feels viscerally through his relationship with his grandmother and then his fellow band of nazi hunters.
Hunters' showrunner David Weil came under fire for creating fictional atrocities committed against prisoners, but how is that any worse than showcasing, ad nauseam, the real ones? Particularly when, in both show's cases, the minutiae of factual storytelling is, sort of, irrelevant?
There are two similar scenes in both shows: The Tattooist of Auschwitz shows a band of prisoners, playing music as best as they can for the enjoyment of their tormentors despite the daily terror of their lives. Music offers nothing to them; their notes are off-key and stilted. They are the backdrop as the camera sweeps through the camp.
In Hunters, similarly, a band is playing for the enjoyment of the guards, equally terrified. And then, in an act of resistance, the band strikes up 'Hava Nagila'. They play with vigour, with joy, with pain, and are summarily shot. Each musician keeps playing, on and on, as their fellow prisoners drop dead. The last notes ring out, a gunshot, and then it is silent – until the prisoners marching along begin to hum.
It is impossible to write about that scene without getting emotional. It is a perfect example of taking something true – prisoners were forced to play music for guards – and employing deliberate, fictional license to evoke a complex emotional response. We see joy, we feel it; we see sadness, we feel it.
To some, we concede, Hunters was trauma porn. However, for its flaws, the boldness of its storytelling outweighs those shortcomings.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz takes no inspired storytelling swings. It opts for a rote adaptation of one of the, literally, millions of stories that came out of the Holocaust (or were lost within it) and tells it in a flat, myopic way. All we are left with is the ceaseless, grey muddiness of the camps and none of the promised 'light' that allowed a 'great love story' to grow, and the fuzzy memory of: 'Wait isn't that the one Melanie Lynskey was in, too?'
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is now available on Sky.
Gabriella Geisinger is a freelance film critic and journalist, with a focus on J-drama & film, and the Japanese production industry. She was previously Locations Editor at Screen International and Deputy Movies Editor at Digital Spy. Her writing can also befound in Curzon, 1883, and more. A born and raised New Yorker, she loves coffee and the colour black, obviously.
