Too much Holocaust fiction – and too loose with the facts

An Australian seminar casts a critical eye over the deluge of novels, sparked by The Tattooist of Auschwitz, that pay too little heed to the details of what happened.

The story of Heather Morris’s runaway success from a standing start with her debut novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz is well known. The book is based on the real-life story of two Slovakian Jews in a World War II camp that was both a concentration camp and a death camp: a man, Lali Solokov, who met and befriended the woman who would become his wife, Gita Furman, when, as a prisoner-functionary, he was required to tattoo her number on her forearm. The novel has since sold five million copies and is being turned into a film series for Stan.

As it gained traction in the marketplace, however, the book began to be criticised increasingly severely by the subjects' family and Holocaust experts. Wanda Witek-Malicka of the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre said its errors created a “distorted version of Auschwitz” that was “dangerous and disrespectful” to its history. Morris countered that the book was not the story of the Holocaust, but a story.

Since then and apparently based on its success, the publishing world has seen an explosion of romance fiction using the Holocaust as an “exotic” location. Check Amazon and you’ll find dozens: The Plum Tree: An Emotional and Heartbreaking Novel of WW2 Germany and the Holocaust; To Dream Of Shadows: A Gripping Holocaust Story Inspired by a Heartbreaking True Story; The Girl in a Striped Dress; 83 Baumstrasse; Hannah's Conflict: A World War Two Holocaust Drama; and many more.

There was a sprinkling of books and films that sought to make the Holocaust less terrifying before that - Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Life is Beautiful; Inglorious Basterds – including films in particular that were written and or directed by people who were, like Morris, not Jewish.

Kim Kelly, a Sydney writer of romantic fiction and researcher in Holocaust literature at Macquarie University, has had a lot to say about this recent phenomenon. In 2019, she wrote a blog about the lack of respect for Jewish experience in romantic fiction that uses the Holocaust as a background, which has since been widely read. Even Thomas Keneally's famous Schindler's Ark got a mention, for making events a little more bearable for readers, although she does agree it was a genuine attempt to make it comprehensible to non-Jews.