by Heather Morris, 2018
Danette recommended this book. It was very, very good. Took you into the lives of Lale and Gita, two Slovak Jews who meet in Auschwitz and it is love at first sight. Lale is the tattooist, the man who tattoos the numbers on the inmates. They somehow survive Auschwitz-Birkenau and, when the Russians arrive in 1945, and everything is in disarray, they escape, but not together. Lale cannot forget Gita, and he searches and finds her on a street in Slovakia, and they get married and live happily ever after. They move to Australia and that is where the author meets Lale and decides to write down his story, first as a play, and then as a novel. I’m not sure why it is considered a novel, since it is a true story. Excellent book.
They survived from 1942 to 1945 by being young and hard-working. Also, Lale bought extra rations from some Polish workers who came in every day to build the crematoria. Lale was given money and jewels by the female prisoners who went through the belongings of each new train load of prisoners brought to Auschwitz. The girls would hide money and jewels and give some to Lale, who hid them in his mattress. One day, the stash was discovered, and he was almost killed – spent three weeks in a torture chamber. But, again, he was saved because the man assigned to torture him was a prisoner whom he had saved. The torturer made it sound like he was killing Lale, but he didn’t, and Lale was able to survive without telling on any of the female prisoners.
It amazed me what Lale and Gita were able to get away with while in prison. Lale used some of the jewels to bribe a female guard, who would let Lale and Gita have time alone together.
The author did a good job exposing the horrors of the camp without destroying the reader. In the beginning, she describes how Lale was taken – innocent people tricked into volunteering to go to the camp to save the rest of their family (who ended up being taken anyway), or innocent people who were rounded up off the streets all over Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Romania (gypsy’s were rounded up); some immediately killed in the gas chambers, some worked to death, some able to survive and tell their stories. The world must never forget this evil. We must not let it happen again. God save us, God have mercy on us. ICE agents are rounding up so called “illegal” immigrants, many because they have a tattoo, and are making them sign papers under duress, that they don’t understand, and shipping them to a prison in El Salvador. Stop the madness! Stop the evil! Please God!