At the end of the day, “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” is a love story. And that’s what a new trailer of the limited series, coming to Peacock this May, wants us to know.
We hear it from the voice of our protagonist, Slovakian Jew Lali Sokolov, played by the legendary Harvey Keitel, who fully melds into the role as a Holocaust survivor living in 2000s Melbourne, telling his story to Heather Morris, the author of the book the show is based on, played by an uncanny Melanie Lynskey.
We hear it when Pepin, the man who takes Lali under his wing in Auschwitz as a new tattooist, tells him, “You have to find something in your mind, a good thing.”
We hear it in the voice of young Lali, a prisoner in the camp, played by Jewish actor Jonah Hauer-King, so evocative in this trailer, as he says, “I found someone.”
And we hear it from the person he found, Gita Furman, played by a bright-eyed Anna Próchniak, as she says, “Love still exists, even here,” referring to the barracks of the concentration camp.
Yet “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” also takes us into Auschwitz itself, and all its horror and brutality — that of the guards and the forced labor and the death march in the cold of a snowy and brutal winter — and shows us the ways these experiences haunted those who survived for the rest of their lives. As Keitel says in the trailer, “Every time I open my eyes, I’m still there.” The scenes from the camp are harrowing, and we see the older Lali being literally haunted by them, as an apparition of the Nazi officer Stefan Baretzki, played by Jonas Nay, stands by his side in his Australian home, decades after the end of the war.
Haunting too is the music of Academy Award-winning Hans Zimmer that we get to hear a bit of in this trailer. Zimmer is the son of a German Jewish refugee, but he kept that part of his identity a secret until late in his life and career. Now he is helping bring the emotions behind this Holocaust project to life.
We’ll get to hear more of his heart-wrenching score when all six episodes of “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” premiere after Passover, on May 2.
