How can anyone resist The Piano?

One challenge facing any novel, drama or film about the Holocaust is to restore its sheer unimaginability. In Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark – filmed, of course, as Schindler’s List – when news reaches Krakow of what’s happening in Auschwitz, Keneally pauses for some editorialising. ‘To write these things now,’ he says, ‘is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942… was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.’

In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, the same fundamental shock is more gradual. By 1942, 26-year-old Lali Sokolov (Jonah Hauer-King) was already subject to Slovakia’s ever-tightening anti-Semitic laws – but surely these were just a temporary disruption to Jewish life? When his Gentile boss was forced to lay him off, it was with regret, a leaving present and the assurance that he’d get his job back after the war.