Heather Morris

The Tattooist of Auschwitz rests on interviews with Lale Sokolov, who tattooed numbers at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and has sold in the millions. The Auschwitz Memorial's research centre then published a long list of factual problems: the number the novel gives Gita is not the number she was assigned, the movements between camps do not match the records, and several incidents cannot be supported. Morris answers that it is a novel built on one man's memory recalled fifty years later, and her publisher classes it as fiction. The family of the real woman named in Cilka's Journey raised a further objection. A reader should know both that it is fiction and that a memorial museum has said so at length.