I promised a dying man I would tell his story...

Heather Morris's incredible novel about the real-life Tattooist of Auschwitz sold 13 million copies and sparked new interest in the Holocaust. As it becomes a gripping six-part TV drama, the writer discusses how she fulfilled a poignant pledge to her friend

- Matt Nixson

FOR 12 long years before it was published as a novel in 2018 and became an overnight sensation, shifting a staggering 13 million copies in 52 countries, The Tattooist of Auschwitz existed as a screenplay. So it's deeply gratifying that Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov's fictionalised memoir has finally been realised in a TV drama.

Or, as straight-talking author Heather Morris puts it: "Lale and I always wanted his story to be seen through a visual medium, and it was only that no bugger was reading my script and nobody wanted to finance the making of it that it became a novel.

"I was complaining about those 'idiots in Hollywood' and, my sister-in-law Peggi Shea in San Diego said, 'Oh goodness, write it as a book and get on with it'." Today New Zealand-born Morris, 71, insists she would happily have self-published the novel, which she nearly did, to fulfil her promise to a dying man.

"I don't know if he heard me, because he was unconscious, but as I kissed him goodbye and I knew I wasn't going to see him again, I said, 'I will never, ever stop trying to tell your story'," she says.

"That was my promise. If I'd had to selfpublish 100 copies and give them away, I'd have done that to fulfil that promise." Happily, the Tattooist was picked up by a major publisher and became a word-ofmouth sensation among readers around the world inspiring a new genre of Holocaust literature featuring lightly fictionalised versions of real-life stories.

Now a poignant six-part adaptation on Sky - the end titles set to a Barbra Streisand recording, Love Will Survive, her first song in six years and first ever for a TV series - will finally bring the remarkable Second World War tale of survival against the odds to millions of TV viewers.

Lale Sokolov's odyssey began in April 1942 when the pro-Nazi authorities in Slovakia began deporting hundreds of Jews.