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. Morris’s defence was that she’d faithfully recorded one man’s memories – but the programme is evidently taking no chances. Not only does it correct some of the mistakes, but it also makes the subjective nature of Sokolov’s narrative much clearer.

Most obviously, Morris becomes a character, and her meetings with the elderly Sokolov (Harvey Keitel, no less) a framing device in which he’s aware that his recall mightn’t be perfect. What the programme does especially well, though, is to make a virtue of this, with Sokolov’s experience of remembering past events as much a part of the story – and at times almost as painful – as the events themselves. Keitel is also understatedly brilliant at portraying a man haunted metaphorically and literally by the past.

Throughout the present-day scenes, Sokolov sees dead fellow inmates, some murmuring, ‘We didn’t come back, Lali came back’. His survivor’s guilt is compounded by his decision to have taken the job of tattooing new prisoners with their camp numbers – something that gained him important privileges, along with accusations of collaborating. ‘I was 26, I wanted to live,’ he tells Morris plaintively: a justification most viewers will find easier to accept than he apparently does.

The trickiest challenge for the series might well lie ahead. At the start, Sokolov announced that ‘this is a love story’ – and we know the prisoner whose eyes he met at the end of the episode is also the wife he’s recently buried. So can it possibly remain free from misplaced sentimentality once it incorporates a romance into Auschwitz? Given its thoughtful and sure-footed showing so far, I wouldn’t bet against it.

And from there it’s quite a handbrake turn to series two of The Piano, which last year gave Channel 4 its highest ratings since 2017. The premise is a straightforward one: various people with heartstring-tugging backstories show up at a railway station and play the piano while presenter Claudia Winkleman and judges Lang Lang and Mika adopt expressions of astonished wonder.

In Manchester Piccadilly, the programme opened with Ellis, who grew up on a council estate with a single mother, couldn’t afford music lessons and took up boxing to avoid prison. He performed Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 with great tenderness and skill. (‘To me, classical music is the finest form of human expression,’ he explained.)

But if this sounds as if the episode had set the heartstring-tugging bar too high too soon, you obviously didn’t watch series one. Sure enough, before long, an assortment of grieving middle-aged women, autistic nine-year-old boys and recovering alcoholics with guide dogs were heading towards Claudia.

Of course, there’s no denying the show’s manipulativeness. But then again, the programme doesn’t deny it either. Instead it simply goes about its business of shamelessly seeking to move us – and shamelessly succeeding. Certainly, if you can resist an 80-year-old man with dementia playing a lovely tune he wrote for his loving wife of 42 years, you’re a) made of sterner stuff than I am; and b) should probably avoid The Piano.