When Heather Morris met an 87-year-old Auschwitz survivor in 2003, he urged her to write down his tale of finding love in the death camp. Little did she realise he was about to change her life for ever…
In November 2003, Heather Morris met a friend for coffee in her adopted town of Melbourne. New Zealand-born Morris, then a 50-year-old mother of three who worked in a hospital, had long dreamt of writing and even taken courses in film screenwriting, but no idea had ever really stuck.
That day in a café, her friend mentioned a male acquaintance, whose mother had recently died, and whose father wanted to share details of his life. Intrigued, a week later Morris knocked on the door of an 87-year-old gentleman, still clearly grieving for his lost wife, who invited her to come in and sit down. Almost immediately, he told her, “Hurry up and tell my story.” Morris replied, “OK, you talk, I’ll listen.”
And what a story it was. Lale Sokolov began his account of how, as a Slovakian Jew, he was imprisoned from 1942 at Auschwitz, where he was soon given the thankless job of tattooing identification numbers on the arms of new prisoners. One such person was fellow Slovakian Gita Furman, with whom Sokolov fell in love at first sight. Their relationship blossomed despite the tyranny of many guards, and the surprising support of a few, until the chaos of the end of the war and the impending liberation of the camp forced them apart – Furman to Slovakia, Sokolov to Austria. The story of their journey back to each other and eventual reunion is the stuff of epic romance, what Morris describes as “proof that love can be found in the darkest and most evil of places”.
Over ten months and many hours of conversation, Sokolov filled in the details of his extraordinary life. Morris remembers: “He was all over the shop, and his stories came in patches. He was 87. One minute he’d tell me he was a ‘tätowierer’ [tattooist], the next it was, ‘I made the numbers.’ And all the time he’d say, ‘Hurry up and tell the story, I need to be with Gita.’ But he kept talking, and I kept listening.”
It seemed the only qualif ication Sokolov required from his writer was that she not be Jewish, “so I carried no baggage,” she explains. She confided to him, though, that her mother’s maiden name was Schwartzweger – Morris was half-German. “He paused, and then said, ‘Never mind, we can’t choose our parents.’ ”
Once Morris mentioned that she planned to write a screenplay from Sokolov’s account, their conversations were replaced by trips to the cinema, where the pensioner happily mused o
