‘My father was the Tattooist of Auschwitz – it took me five attempts to visit his prison home’

Lali Sokolov – better known as the Tattooist of Auschwitz, who was immortalised in the 2018 book that has sold more than 13 million copies in 40 languages – has done more to keep the horrors of the Second World War alive than most in recent memory.

But in spite of the global attention his tale wrought, there was one last thing that remained undone. “One of my dad’s dying wishes was to go back to Auschwitz, to apologise to all the people whose lives he couldn’t save,” says his son Gary, recalling a conversation he had with his father in 2006, when Lali was 90. “And one of my biggest regrets was not just jumping on a plane and going straight there with him. Because five weeks later, he passed away.”

And so on Monday, on the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, Sky History is airing a documentary (The Tattooist’s Son) showing Gary making that long-awaited visit. Over almost four decades, he had tried several times to pass beneath the gates reading “Arbeit macht frei” – “work sets you free” – where his parents met in 1942, amid one of the worst episodes of ethnic cleansing in human history. But each time he faltered, the weight of what he might see was too much to bear.

“I felt like a coward,” he says of his failed attempts; of the nights he woke up in a sweat, paralysed by the journey he could not take. “Why do I not have the guts to do it? This is my parents’ history,” he chastises himself. On this occasion, while determined to walk through the camp for the first time, he had an intense physical reaction, his legs shaking so violently that filming had to temporarily stop. Still, he told himself, there was no turning back. “I have to do this now.”

Passing beneath the gates, and by the crematoria and cell blocks, was “horrific”. “It was way beyond my expectation of how horrific it was,” he says. Things grew darker still as he ventured through Birkenau, tacked onto Auschwitz in 1941, the sheer size of the camp somehow magnifying the atrocities that took place there. Those two days filming in Poland in September were, unequivocally, harrowing. But they were also “the best thing I ever did. It brought me so much closer to my parents,” he says.

The experience illuminated his parents’ story in the kind of grim technicolour Gary spent most of his life without. Growing up in Melbourne, where Lali and his wife, Gita, moved after the war (a bid to get as far from Nazism and Communism as possible), he had been unaware of the unthinkable environment to which he owes his life. All he knew as a child was that his mother and father were relentlessly optimistic – “if you wake up in the morning, it’s a good day,” was one of Lali’s choice mantras, along with an insistence on a “PMA”, or positive mental attitude. Gary too shares that buoyancy, beaming for the majority of our conversation.

In spite of his parents’ positivity, some elements of his childhood seemed strange – inexplicable, somehow. A school-aged Gary would sometimes walk into the kitchen and find his father staring out of the window, as if in a trance; nothing could shake him from it.

Depression appeared to grip his mother, who one day returned home with her prison number – 4562 – surgically removed from her arm. She would always pluck four and five-leaf clovers when she saw them, a hardwired habit from her days in captivity, it transpired, when giving them to Nazi guards might secure extra soup or bread.

Both Lali and Gita were taken from their homes in Slovakia to Poland’s blue-and-white-striped hell in 1942. Lali, then 25, contracted typhus within weeks of arriving that April, and was slung on a death cart. When a fellow prisoner spotted him, he was retrieved, nursed back to health by his peers, and given a job assisting Auschwitz’s tätowierer (tattooist).

He inked the forearm of a shaven-headed Gita, 18, three months later. Their connection was immediate; over the next two-and-a-half years they would try to meet when prisoners were mixed en masse on camp grounds. Lali befriended guards in order to get letters to her, and found a way to smuggle medication to Gita when he learnt she was sick.

When Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945, Lali, who had been sent to another camp on a cattle train, escaped and headed to war-ravaged Bratislava, where he waited for his love at the train station each day, refusing to believe she hadn’t survived. Three weeks later, he caught sight of her, and proposed on the spot.

Most of this was a mystery to Gary until The Tattooist of Auschwitz, written by Heather Morris, was released seven years ago. Morris met Lali in 2003, soon after Gita’s death, and quickly became a vessel for the horrors he had endured. For Lali, who had scarcely shed a tear in the 60 years between leaving Auschwitz and losing Gita, the floodgates were finally open, the excruciating details his son had so long been protected from finally laid bare.

Until he read the manuscript, Gary knew nothing of the fact Lali had seen Josef Mengele, “the angel of death”, pick his victims from those his father had just tattooed; that Gita had been made a guinea pig for Nazi experiments too, leaving her and Lali spending 16 years attempting to conceive Gary, their “medical miracle”.

Gary believes he owes his life to the guards his father befriended. “My dad was conflicted when Stefan Baretzki [an SS guard] went to trial because he did actually help my dad a lot. He helped my dad and mum communicate and meet on the odd occasion. He kept them both alive. And if not for Baretzki, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”

Gita arrived at Auschwitz with three sisters, who never made it out, and whose existence she had never spoken of to her son (he only learnt their names while filming the documentary). Despite all they bore witness to, their son’s first primer on the Second World War came via the 1973 British documentary series The World at War, which they instructed him to watch with the door closed, when he was 12. They couldn’t bear to relive it again.

While it has become an unlikely sensation, The Tattooist of Auschwitz has had its share of criticism, too. Gary himself spoke out about inaccuracies in the original book – including his mother’s incorrect prisoner number, and the wrong spelling of his father’s name – but says now that “it is not a historical document. It is my father’s memories. It’s my mother’s memories. It’s their story. And all these little inaccuracies in my mind are irrelevant to the bigger picture of actually watching people survive, showing that bad times do end, showing how horrific it was to actually live during the Holocaust.”

Far more important, he believes, is enshrining the legacy the Sokolovs have left, in a world in which younger generations in particular are growing evermore distant from the Second World War.

He has been intent not to let his children, who never met his parents, have the same experience. Staying connected to that past, including Israel – “a beautiful country” and a “second home” (he won’t be drawn on the conflict with Palestine) – is important to him, as is observing the religion that is subject to rising global anti-Semitism. Earlier this month, a poll from the Anti-Defamation League showed that anti-Semitic attitudes had risen among 46 per cent of the world’s adults, compared to a decade ago. He calls the violent demonstrations in the likes of the UK “mind-boggling”, and is grateful to have experienced few such sentiments himself, save for one journey through Vienna airport. Wearing his skullcap, “I was fully aware of how many people were looking at me,” he remembers. “I just felt uncomfortable.”

He hopes that his parents’ words – and to some extent, his own – will continue to spread much-needed awareness. After the release of last year’s Tattooist of Auschwitz miniseries (based on the book), starring Harvey Keitel, “there were more hits on the Auschwitz website than ever before in the history of Auschwitz, which just shows the interest it has created in learning, relearning, educating people,” Gary says.

What his parents’ story is “doing to help remember is an amazing thing. My dad was 5ft 1in. My mum was 4ft 9in and a half. So these tiny little people, their story has had such a positive global impact.” (Not that their diminutive stature impacted the magnitude of star Lali hoped might one day play them; he considered Brad Pitt a fitting candidate for himself, and Natalie Portman the perfect Gita.)

This means all the more to their son in their absence, as he raises the two granddaughters they never got to meet. “That’s a really big regret, because having kids was really, really important to me,” he explains of his need to ensure “that my parents didn’t survive for nothing, that there was continuity”.

His eldest, 12-year-old Aviva, is the “spitting image” of his late mother, sharing her love of singing, and being in the kitchen (and making the same face Gita used to when she tells him off). Recently, he said to his wife: “Oh my God, it’s my mum. She’s come back because she didn’t feel like she nagged me enough.”

He likes to imagine that his parents are smiling down on the girls, as well as relishing their unexpected star status. “I love the fact that my parents are world famous,” he says, and “I’m so proud these stories got to be out there and had such a positive impact on God knows how many millions of people. I mean, how cool is that?”

The Tattooist’s Son: Journey to Auschwitz is available to watch on Sky History and Now TV

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