THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

By Heather Morris

Read by Richard Armitage

7 hours, 25 minutes. HarperAudio

Listening to this novel on my iPhone during the past week — while clutching a subway strap, trotting on a treadmill, filling my basket at Trader Joe’s, biking down Amsterdam Avenue, walking my dog around the Harlem Meer — I began to notice how many other people in the city wear headphones as they go about their daily lives. Having recently moved back into New York City from the suburbs, where I mostly listened to audiobooks in my car, I was struck by how different it is listening to a book on headphones while doing other things. On the one hand it’s a peculiarly intimate experience; the narrator speaks directly into your ear, as if to you alone. On the other hand, it can be hard to concentrate on the story, particularly if it’s nonlinear or experimental.

“The Tattooist of Auschwitz” is neither of these. If I hadn’t read that Heather Morris originally wrote this novel as a screenplay, I might’ve guessed: The story clips along without extraneous exposition, and the dialogue is snappy and convincing. As a reader, I’m usually drawn to dense wordplay and complicated perspectives. But as a multitasking listener, I found the straightforward, chronological narrative easy and pleasurable to follow.

Based on the author’s interviews with a Jewish Holocaust survivor, “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” is the story of Lale Sokolov, Prisoner 32407, who was transported from Slovakia to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Birkenau, Poland, in 1942 and assigned the task of tattooing numbers on his fellow prisoners’ arms. As a Tätowierer, Lale was in a privileged but morally compromised position, “performing an act of defilement on people of his own faith,” as the narrator notes. Unlike most prisoners, Lale had agency. He was given his own room, fed extra rations and allowed freedoms most prisoners were denied, like traversing the camp alone and visiting both male and female barracks.