How can anyone resist The Piano?

One challenge facing any novel, drama or film about the Holocaust is to restore its sheer unimaginability. In Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark – filmed, of course, as Schindler’s List – when news reaches Krakow of what’s happening in Auschwitz, Keneally pauses for some editorialising. ‘To write these things now,’ he says, ‘is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942… was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.’

In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the same fundamental shock is more gradual. By 1942, 26-year-old Lali Sokolov (Jonah Hauer-King) was already subject to Slovakia’s ever-tightening anti-Semitic laws – but surely these were just a temporary disruption to Jewish life? When his Gentile boss was forced to lay him off, it was with regret, a leaving present and the assurance that he’d get his job back after the war.

Then came a government letter demanding that one person from every Jewish household report for work duty. Granted, there were ‘rumours’ about what this might mean in reality. Even so, when Lali arrived at the railway station, he was more puzzled than anything else when one of the soldiers there, an old school friend, urged him to ‘run away as far you can’. Only when he was installed in Auschwitz and saw three inmates shot dead as they squatted over the latrines did his stable ideas about humankind begin to shift.

This new series is based on the novel by Heather Morris, a Melbourne nurse who’d long dreamed of being a writer when she heard in 2003 that a local Holocaust survivor called Sokolov wanted someone to tell his story. The resulting book was a global bestseller, but was criticised by some Jewish groups for factual inaccuracies.