The Tattooist Of Auschwitz review: Love endures amid the soul-searing cruelty ... trends now
Perhaps it is a trick of the imagination.
Perhaps it is some chemical or psychic echo. But anyone who has walked through the underground gas chamber at Auschwitz in Poland can attest to its overwhelming aura of horror.
In the opening shots of The Tattooist Of Auschwitz, the Holocaust survivor Lali Sokolov (Jonah Hauer-King) is taken through the jaws of death into 'Bunker 1', the killing room, by an SS soldier.
At the end of his life, Sokolov (played in old age by Harvey Keitel) describes the moment in more detail to naive, middle-aged mother Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey), who is helping him to write his memoirs.
The Nazi guard needed him to decipher the numbers tattooed on the arms of two naked corpses, lying on the floor of the gas chamber.
Holocaust survivor Lali Sokolov (Jonah Hauer-King) is taken through the jaws of death into 'Bunker 1', the killing room, by an SS soldier in The Tattooist of Auschwitz
This adaptation of Heather Morris's 2018 bestseller, based on Lali Sokolov's true story, does not flinch from the soul-searing cruelty of the death camps
Their faces and histories were of no interest to the soldiers, but an accurate catalogue of their ID numbers was considered essential.
That Prussian obsession with book-keeping is one of the most chilling aspects of the museum that stands today at Auschwitz, near Krakow.
The precisely compiled records of extermination are as shocking, in
