I hesitated over many months about this book as I thought it might be too "raw" and painful to read as many of my family were Czechoslovak and Polish (Catholic not Jewish) sent to concentration camps and as I child I grew up with the true stories of Auschwitz, the Germans and the Russian soldiers, but, my fears were ill founded this book is almost a fairy tale.
Although it is a true story of one man and his quest for staying alive and returning to his family in Slovakia and keeping a girl he met at Auschwitz alive and finding her after the war. I found the book very basic and simply skirted over the reality of the every day struggles of those people trying to stay alive in an abhorrent situation. It is about love and survival but probably enhanced to make it more acceptable as a novel - Lale meeting Gita after the war in the street is unbelievable. It touches on some of the "experiments" of Josef Mengele and how both the German and Russian soldiers raped, abused and degraded women. It describes the relationship between the Tattooist (Lale) and his captors. Overall an enjoyable read but not historically accurate more fiction than fact.
Although it is a true story of one man and his quest for staying alive and returning to his family in Slovakia and keeping a girl he met at Auschwitz alive and finding her after the war. I found the book very basic and simply skirted over the reality of the every day struggles of those people trying to stay alive in an abhorrent situation. It is about love and survival but probably enhanced to make it more acceptable as a novel - Lale meeting Gita after the war in the street is unbelievable. It touches on some of the "experiments" of Josef Mengele and how both the German and Russian soldiers raped, abused and degraded women. It describes the relationship between the Tattooist (Lale) and his captors. Overall an enjoyable read but not historically accurate more fiction than fact.