There’s been a lot of moaning in certain quarters about this series, on the grounds that the Holocaust shouldn’t be used as “entertainment”. I beg to differ. Yes, there are now dozens of Holocaust novels and numerous films, and I think that it’s all getting a bit much and arguably a bit exploitative; but the book on which this is based was one of the first, and it’s telling a true story. As for “entertainment”, that’s the wrong word. What it’s doing is rehumanising people whom the concentration camps dehumanised.
A few years back, someone moaned that Anne Frank shouldn’t be seen as the “face” of the Holocaust because most of her diary was trivial stuff about arguing with her family, finding Mr Dussel annoying and fancying Peter van Daan. Of course she should, and of course it was. That’s the sort of thing that teenage girls write about. She was just an ordinary teenage girl, and Lale Sokolov (formerly Eisenberg), the main character in this story, was just an ordinary young man. Who fell in love. With an ordinary young woman. In the most horrific circumstances in human history. Because they were still human. So, yes, it’s OK to have a love story set at Auschwitz. It’s proving that, even after people were stripped, shaved, and tattooed with a number instead of their name, they were still human.
Yes, there are errors in the book. The number tattooed on the arm of Gisela “Gita” Fuhrmannova, Lale’s future wife, is wrong. There’s a reference to penicillin, long before it was widely available. Some of what’s said about Josef Mengele doesn’t agree with other sources. It’s obviously not great that there are errors; but it was written from an elderly man’s memories of what happened over half a century earlier, not as a textbook.
There’s also been some moaning about the casting in the TV adaptation. Jonah Hauer-King, as the young Lale, speaks RP English. Harvey Keitel, as the older Lale, speaks English with an Eastern European accent. Er, folks, the young Lale would have been speaking his mother tongue (presumably Slovak?), not English. So he wouldn’t have been speaking with a foreign accent, would he?! There’s even been moaning because CGI was used to “reconstruct” an Auschwitz set, rather than filming at the real site. How on earth could they have built the set at the real site?
The story’s quite well-known now. In Bratislava, it’s demanded that one person from each Jewish household “volunteer” to “help the war effort”. Lale goes, and finds himself being transported to Auschwitz, where he becomes one of those tattooing numbers on the arms of new prisoners. One of the prisoners is Gita. At the end of the war, they’re separated, but meet in Bratislava, marry, and later move to Australia. Decades later, after Gita’s death, Lale tells his story to Heather Morris, who writes a book about it.
I’m not sure how well the decision to show the story as flashbacks worked. We were shown Lale and Heather, and then flashbacks to Auschwitz; and jumping backwards and forwards between timelines never works that well. We also saw the older Lale being haunted by visions of friends who’d been murdered, and by an SS office with whom he’d had a lot of interaction, which was also a bit confusing. But I think that the programme did a reasonably good job of trying to depict the horrors of the camp, even showing black smoke coming out of the gas chambers, and Lale witnessing people being shot dead at random. It tried. It’s a very sensitive topic, and any book or film or TV series about it is always going to be controversial. Sky have really done their best to *be* sensitive, with the series being directed by the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor.
A week after the Holocaust memorial in Hyde Park was covered up because of fears that it was at risk of vandalism, and two days after Poland’s main synagogue was firebombed, watch this. And just watch it. Don’t drive yourself mad worrying about accents or exact numbers. Just watch it, and take it in.