The True Story of the Tattooist of Auschwitz

Eighty years ago, on January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Third Reich’s largest concentration camp. Among the prisoners was a young Slovak named Lale Sokolov, forced by the Nazis to tattoo his fellow inmates in order to survive. Auschwitz was the only camp where detainees were tattooed. One day, while carrying out his grim task, Lale meets the eyes of a woman he is about to tattoo: Gita Furman, a 17-year-old Slovakian Jew. In this hell, where people kill each other for a piece of bread, a bowl of soup or a shabby blanket, Lale and Gita manage to survive. After enduring hardship and separation, they meet again unexpectedly after the liberation of the camps, and marry in 1945, before leaving Europe for Australia to start a family. From darkness to light, this documentary tells a story of how love and hope triumphed over the horror of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. The film is based on interviews with Lale and Gita Sokolov filmed in the mid-1990s; numerous archives and photographs of the camp, including those in the "Auschwitz album" compiled by the Nazis themselves; and interviews with international historians of the Holocaust: Tal Bruttmann (France), Gideon Grief (Israel), Piotr Setkiewicz (Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum), and Wanda Witek-Malicka (Poland, Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum).