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Meet Heather Morris
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Author’s Note
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About the Author
Meet Heather Morris
HEATHER MORRIS is a native of New Zealand, and now resides in Australia. For several years, while working in a large public hospital in Melbourne, she studied and wrote screenplays, one of which was optioned in the United States. In 2003, Heather was introduced to an elderly gentleman who “might just have a story worth telling.” The day she met Lale Sokolov changed both their lives. Their friendship grew, and Lale embarked on a journey of self-scrutiny, entrusting the innermost details of his life during the Holocaust to her. Heather originally wrote Lale’s story as a screenplay—which ranked high in international competitions— before reshaping it into her debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
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About the Book
Author’s Note
I’M IN THE LIVING room of the home of an elderly man. I don’t know him well yet, but I’ve quickly come to know his dogs, Tootsie and Bam Bam—one the size of a pony and the other smaller than my cat. Thankfully I’ve won them over, and right now they are asleep.
I look away for a moment. I have to tell him.
“You do know I’m not Jewish?”
An hour has passed since we met. The elderly man in the chair opposite me gives an impatient but not unfriendly snort. He looks away, folds his fingers. His legs are crossed, and the free foot raps a silent beat. His eyes look toward the window and the open space outside.
“Yes,” he says finally, turning to me with a smile. “That’s why I want you.”
I relax a little. Maybe I am in the right place after all.
“So,” he says, as though he is about to share a joke, “tell me what you know about Jews.”
Seven-branch candlesticks come to mind as I scramble for something to say.
“Do you know any Jews?”
I come up with one. “I work with a woman named Bella. She’s Jewish, I think.”
I expect disdain but instead receive enthusiasm. “Good!” he says.
I’ve passed another test.
Next comes the first instruction. “You will have no preconceptions about what I tell you.” He pauses, as though searching for words. “I don’t want any personal baggage brought to my story.”
I shift uncomfortably. “Maybe there is some.”
He leans forward unsteadily. He catches the table with a hand. The table is unsteady, too, and its uneven leg smacks against the floor, causing an echo. The dogs wake up, startled.
I swallow. “My mother’s maiden name was Schwartfeger. Her family was German.”
He relaxes. “We all come from somewhere,” he says.
“Yes, but I’m a Kiwi. My mother’s family has lived in New Zealand for over a hundred years.”
“Immigrants.”
“Yes.”
He sits back, relaxed now. “How quickly can you write?” he asks.
I’m thrown off balance. What exactly is he asking here? “Well, it depends on what I’m writing.”
“I need you to work quickly. I don’t have much time.”
Panic. I had deliberately not brought any recording or writing materials with me to this first meeting. I’d been invited to hear and consider writing his life story. For now, I just wanted to listen. “How much time do you have?” I ask him.
“A little while only.”
I’m confused. “Do you have to be somewhere soon?”
“Yes,” he says, his gaze again returning to the open window. “I need to be with Gita.”
* * *
I never met Gita. It was her death and Lale’s need to join her that pushed him to tell his story. He wanted it to be recorded so, in his words, “it would never happen again.”
After that first meeting, I visited Lale two or three times a week. The story took three years to untangle. I had to earn his trust, and it took time before he was willing to embark on the deep self-scrutiny that parts of his story required. We had become friends—no, more than friends; our lives became entwined as he shed the burden of guilt he had carried for more than fifty years, the fear that he and Gita might be seen as Nazi collaborators. Part of Lale’s burden passed to me as I sat with him at his kitchen table, this dear man with his trembling hands, his quivering voice, his eyes that still moistened sixty years after experiencing the most horrifying events in human history.
He told his story piecemeal, sometimes slowly, sometimes at bullet pace and without clear connections between the many, many episodes. But it didn’t matter. It was spellbinding to sit with him and his two dogs, and listen to what to an uninterested ear might have sounded like the ramblings of an old man. Was it the delightful Eastern European accent? The charm of this old rascal? Was it the twisted story I was starting to make sense of? It was all of these and more.
As the teller of Lale’s story, I had to identify how memory and history sometimes waltz in step and sometimes strain to part, to present not a lesson in history, of which there are many, but a unique lesson in humanity. Lale’s memories were, on the whole, remarkably clear and precise. They matched my research into people, dates, and places. Was this a comfort? Getting to know a person for whom such terrible facts had been a lived reality made them all the more horrific. There was no parting of memory and history for this beautiful old man—they waltzed perfectly in step.
The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a story of two ordinary people living in an extraordinary time, deprived not only of their freedom but also their dignity, their names, and their identities. It is Lale’s account of what they needed to do to survive. Lale lived his life by the motto: “If you wake up in the morning, it is a good day.” On the morning of his funeral I woke knowing it was not a good day for me, but that it would have been for him. He was now with Gita.
Additional Information
LALE WAS BORN LUDWIG Eisenberg on October 28, 1916, in Krompachy, Slovakia. He was transported to Auschwitz on April 23,1942, and tattooed with the number 32407.
Gita was born Gisela Fuhrmannova (Furman) on March 11, 1925, in Vranov nad Topl’ou, Slovakia. She was transported to Auschwitz on April 13, 1942, and tattooed with the number 34902. She was retattoed by Lale in July when she moved from Auschwitz to Birkenau.
Lale’s parents, Jozef and Serena Eisenberg, were transported to Auschwitz on March 26, 1942, while Lale was still in Prague. Research has uncovered that they were killed immediately upon arrival at Auschwitz. Lale never knew this. It was discovered after his death.
Lale was imprisoned in the Strafkompanie (penal unit) from June 16 to July 10, 1944, where he was tortured by Jakub. No one was expected to survive or be released from that unit.
Gita’s neighbor Hilda Goldstein survived and made her way home to Vranov nad Topl’ou.
Cilka was charged as a Nazi conspirator and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labor, which she served in Siberia. Afterward, she returned to Bratislava. She and Gita met only once, in the mid-1970s, when Gita went to visit her two brothers.
In 1961, Stefan Baretski was tried for war crimes in Frankfurt and sentenced to life imprisonment. On June 21, 1988, he committed suicide in the Konitzky-Stift Hospital in Bad Nauheim, Germany.
Gita died on October 3, 2003.
Lale died on October 31, 2006.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
P.S.TM is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ. Copyright © 2018 by Heather Morris. A
ll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by James Iacobelli
Cover image © akg-images / Mondadori Portfolio (couple); © Miemo Penttinen/Getty images (skyline); © Lightix/ Physics_joe/ Shutterstock (2 images)
Title page photograph by taranchic / Shutterstock
Europe map by Nicolette Caven
Birkenau map © Peter Palm, Berlin/Germany
Originally published as The Tattooist of Auschwitz in Australia in 2018 by Bonnier Publishing Australia and in the UK by Bonnier Zaffre.
FIRST U.S. EDITION
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-279716-2
Version 07202018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
About the Publisher
Australia
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United Kingdom
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