The secret love of the Auschwitz tattooist

Updated

Lale Sokolov's journey from prisoner to chief tattooist at the Nazis' most notorious concentration camp haunted him into old age. Yet what's remarkable is how he fell in love with, and later married, a Jewish girl whose arm he personally tattooed with an identification number.

To his neighbours in suburban Melbourne, Lale would have appeared unremarkable.

Having departed Europe decades earlier in the aftermath of WWII, his experience was something he chose not to dwell on.

It wouldn't be until he was well into his 80s that Lale would share his story. And then it was a further decade after his death in 2006 before it was revealed to the world.

"He had what I believe to be a misplaced sense of guilt," said author Heather Morris, who spent three years recording Lale's story and researching his background.

"He had what many people had, which was what I would call survivor's guilt."

Ms Morris has turned his story into a new book — The Tattooist of Auschwitz — which details how Lale was forced into a job that irrevocably changed him, but which also sparked an incredible love story that defied the inhumanity of the time.

The war arrives

Lale's early life was a relatively charmed one.

Born Ludwig "Lale" Eisenberg in 1916 to Jewish parents in a small town in Slovakia, he spent his youth travelling.

But, of course, the war changed everything.

By the early 1940s Jewish businesses were being confiscated and Jews were being rounded up to "work" for the Germans. At least that's what they were being told.

When an order came that each family had to hand over someone to go to work, Lale offered himself up so his siblings and parents would be spared.

Lale would later tell Ms Morris in a rare recorded interview:

"I was 24 years of age when taken from my parents' home and transported like an animal to an unknown place."

That unknown place was Auschwitz. The year was 1942. And his serial number — branded on him by the tattooist he would come to replace — was 32407.

Tattooing prisoners was unique to Auschwitz and was introduced when the death toll became so large, and the practice of removing clothing so rife, that it became impossible to identify bodies.

When the trains rolled in, those selected to work were given serial numbers. The rest, never registered or numbered, were sent straight to the gas chambers.

Lale was first assigned to a labour job building new dorms for the ever-expanding concentration camp, but he soon came to the attention of the SS guards.

His ability to speak multiple languages — Slovakian, French, Russian and, most importantly, German — meant he rose to prominence in a sea of men stripped of identity.

Soon Lale was assigned to assist the then-tattooist — a French man named Pepan — who taught him the rules.

Keep your head down. Keep your mouth shut. Don't cause trouble. And above all, tattoo whoever comes off the train and lines up in front of you: man, woman or child.

The alternative was to be killed.

"I wouldn't call it work, because that gives the impression of pay. He was given a job to do," Ms Morris said.

"I don't think he necessarily thought of himself [as a survivor]. In fact, I don't think he used the word survivor in all the time we talked."

When Pepan disappeared one day, in the way many did at the camp, Lale found himself thrust into the main role.

With this station came some comforts. He received additional food and, for a while, private sleeping quarters.

Ms Morris was joined by researchers in Australia and Europe to uncover what they could of Lale's history.

Among the historic documents they found paperwork with Lale's name on it under the title, Politische Abt: Aufnahmeschreiber — which translates to "political wing: record writer".

It was dated July 26, 1944, and was the proof they needed that Lale was now reporting to the political wing of the SS.

Ms Morris is emphatic Lale wasn't a Nazi conspirator, although she said he feared some might consider him so.

"He looked for opportunities to survive," she surmised, adding that for Lale death was always a single wrong step away.

The infamous SS officer and Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele made sure he knew that.

Mengele was known for conducting fatal experiments on prisoners and choosing who would be sent to the gas chambers.

"No-one scared Lale like Mengele," Ms Morris said.

"He would drop his tattooing needle because he'd be shaking.

"And Mengele would see him looking terrified and sidle over and say, 'One day, tetovierer [tattooist]. One day I will take you.'

"He would have his gun — why would a doctor need a gun? — and he would take it out and hold it to Lale's head."

Finding love at the end of a needle

It was while working at his tattoo station that Lale first met Gita.

Born Gisela Fuhrmannova, Gita had arrived at the camp shortly before Lale, but had been sent to him to have her tattoo redone because it was fading. The Nazis wanted to make sure the ink was permanent.

Lale would later tell Ms Morris that as he pushed the needle into her arm and retraced the number — 34902 — he felt an immediate connection.

He'd gone through this process thousands of times already: breaking the skin, wiping the blood away, and rubbing the green ink in. But this time felt different. And it seemed Gita felt the same.

"I tattooed her number on her left arm, and she tattooed her number in my heart," Lale said.

What followed was a clandestine courtship, made up of secret letters smuggled between the men's and women's dorms.

Gita and Lale had stolen moments on the rare Sundays when they didn't have to work and the guards weren't paying close attention.

When Lale managed to sneak chocolate past his SS minders the pair would snatch moments of happiness devouring it behind the dorms crowded with inmates.

When the war started to turn against the Germans and the Russian army closed in on Auschwitz, the prisoners were shipped out.

Gita and the women were marched to waiting trains and Lale was sent to another camp, Mauthausen. The pair was lost.

When the war finally ended, Lale returned home to discover his parents and brother were gone — never to be seen again. Only his sister remained.

Ms Morris and her researchers wouldn't find out until after Lale died that his parents had also been sent to Auschwitz, but had been killed immediately.

"In a way I'm not sad about finding that out after Lale died," Ms Morris said.

"It would have devastated him to know his parents had ended up in the same camp he spent those years.

"They didn't survive past day one."

With no anchor at home, and a yearning to find Gita, Lale made for the main train station in Bratislava where many survivors were coming through. He was armed with nothing but a name and a sense of hope.

For two weeks he waited day and night at the station, scanning the masses of gaunt and weathered faces as they shuffled off the trains.

One day Gita's familiar face came into view, in a reunion that Ms Morris said was more poetic than anything even Hollywood could contrive.

Love endures — but so does pain

Lale and Gita married in October 1945, mere months after the war ended.

They tried to make a life in Europe, but the politically charged aftermath of the war meant danger was still ever-present, so they set sail for Australia.

Their son Gary — born in 1961 when the pair settled in Melbourne — said their love never wavered despite the horror of its origin.

"There was an abundance of warmth at home," he said.

"Both of them exceptionally loving, exceptionally devoted.

"I think being the only son to come out of it, it was quite daunting, because to them it was like, 'Yeah we beat you and there's going to be a future'."

His parents established a textile business and lived a happy life, enjoying pleasures where they could.

Like many who had survived, Gita placed a high priority on food and Gary recalls how her meals were famous among his friends.

Yet his parents never fully escaped the nightmare of the war.

Lale never returned to Europe, and Gita made few trips. They made Gary watch the World At War TV series when he was just 13 but they couldn't bear to watch it with him.

While Lale occasionally spoke about his experiences with other men on the Jewish holidays, his mum said nothing of the details.

"One of the things that blew me away the most was in the documentation [Ms Morris] had found, my mother never told me, ever, that she had three sisters," he said.

"I think that she'd probably just moved on and didn't want to think about it herself."

Instead, the scars of their Auschwitz days became evident in other ways.

Gary said his father had hardened himself and maintained a practised lack of emotion and heightened sense of survival instinct right up until his death.

When his own sister, and only surviving family member died Lale still did not shed a tear.

"The first time I saw him cry, and it was the last time I saw him cry, was when my mother passed away and we were on our way to the funeral," he said.

"He was just like, 'We've got our lives. If we're alive we can solve anything and we just keep going'."

Topics: unrest-conflict-and-war, world-war-2, australia

First posted