If I were to tell you that for more than 50 years a man kept a really controversial secret, a very heavy emotional burden that not only changed his life in the past, but had a direct impact on the lives of billions of others; and that only today we know something about what happened thanks, unfortunately, to the death by natural causes of the love of his life.... Yes, I know it seems too strange, bizarre and above all, full of many curious coincidences, but this novel based on real events, is a real treasure that every reader should devour; even if it is only once in a lifetime...
However, for the last two weeks I have been compulsively reading this wonderful book, which out of curiosity and chance of life I was able to find. The version I read was not available in Spanish, but it is available in English. The protagonist is a person who is now deceased, and who during almost the entire Second World War (1942 to 1945) experienced at first hand the horrors inside the butchery that Auschwitz was for millions of victims who entered its nauseating maw full of diligent officers servile to the most disgusting human industrial barbarism.
Recognising this context, the one I mentioned in the previous paragraph, is vital to understand what happens to the character in the novel. In this brief REVIEW I will not make any spoilers or spoil anything at all. I am a woman who is respectful of uncertainty and I do not share the concept of damaging the plot to someone else who does not know all the details. However, I will speak in very relative and broad terms, and my opinions and assessments will be along the lines of how I felt as a reader and above all, I will give a prominent place to how the story is remembered 79 years after the end of the Holocaust in Europe in May 1945.
This being said, Lale Sokolov was the "tattooist of Auschwitz". Like many Jews of the time, he had 1 of 3 possible options: to die as a hostage of the Nazis, to die in battle against the Nazis, or to resist and survive. Good old "Ludwig" chose the latter... Everything that the novel narrates has been compiled by the researcher and magnificent journalist Heather Morris; Australian by birth and who was interested in documenting the last days of the war through the eyes of its survivors years later. What this author never imagined was that through the compilation of archives and research data she would come across a curious piece of gossip: "a man finds love in Auschwitz".
Morris, through several of his interviewees (who were elderly Jews), survivors of the Holocaust in the German-occupied Polish town, narrated that they had an acquaintance of an acquaintance who survived the horror there and who, as if that were not enough, was rumoured to be in charge of tattooing all the inmates of the most terrifying concentration camp of the entire armed conflict. Like many of the victims, the Nazis, especially the SS, forced the Jews and other minorities they held inside Auschwitz to do some of the dirty work. Just as Sokolov came one day to his "mentor" and "protector" Peppan.
He was the person who taught him how to effectively survive the concentration camp. Of French origin and a member of the Jewish faith like Lale, Peppan immediately sheltered the novel's protagonist and taught him everything he needed to know to do his job usefully and humanely: marking the bodies of the thousands and millions of female prisoners who saw the sun for the last time in that dreary, stinking place. And how did Morris corroborate this? This is something that the book develops wonderfully well, and which I will leave to the reader's healthy and proper curiosity to see for themselves as they read this novel.
Is a tattooist or a sonderkommando, or anyone who "worked" with the Nazis, a collaborator and a traitor to his or her own people? Or, on the contrary, is life curious, and indeed cruel, for allowing those who had to do what they had to do in very hard times, which we are not able to fully understand, to enjoy long and full lives, as opposed to those millions of people, old people, children, women, who saw their lives end in a suffocating way? I can assure you that this novel is fascinating because it involves you fully with the vision of the protagonist, but it makes you think and think....
Historically and linguistically, it is a flirtation between a journalistic investigation typical of the intrigue or thriller genre, but it is also a first-person account of horror and the human capacity to adapt to even the worst imaginable situation. A gateway to mental exercise and, above all, to that evil but extremely recurrent part of our history as a species. The one that never seems to have happened but is still present in many areas of our societies. For HIVE Book Club, this is my first post, and I hope this review is both worthy of this community and inspiring for the different curiosities.
