MarilynW's Reviews > The Tattooist of Auschwitz

I wanted to read The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris, before I read a book that I've put off for too long, Cilka's Journey. Rather than read the print version of The Tattooist of Auschwitz, I chose to listen to the audio version, narrated by Richard Armitage, who is becoming a favorite narrator of mine. In this book, we follow twenty six year old Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, forcibly transported to the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in 1942. We learn of his love for a young woman who he meets in the camp, when he tattoos her arm, as he did for other prisoners entering the camps. Lale passed away in 2006 but spent the three years before he died, relating his memories of his time at Auschwitz. 

The story is brutal because this is the story of the Holocaust. The horror of what happened to over a million people is behind this story of two people who survive the camps and live to marry and raise a son. Lale wasn't willing to tell his story until his wife died because he was afraid of being labeled a Nazi collaborator, due to his work as a tattooist and the privileges he received for doing such work. As with other stories about the Holocaust that I have read in the last two years, my mind can't even grasp the horror of what happened. It is through reading stories like this that I want to remember the people who lost their lives, many of them lost in a pile of bodies, never to be identified, once they were taken prisoner and having their humanity diminished by men who thought they were better. 

The entire time I read books like this one, my heart goes out to each individual that suffered...in my way, I want to pay homage to the individual people whose lives were minimized and taken. I don't want to forget what happened, as hard as it is to remember. I was able to borrow this book from Hoopla, via my local library. 

Published September 4, 2018