Debut Author Spotlight: Heather Morris

Heather Morris' debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, started with a simple question: Would she like to meet a man who had a story to tell?

Morris' meeting with Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov would change her life. Sokolov was a Slovakian Jew who was transported to Auschwitz in 1942 and became the person who tattooed Nazi identification numbers onto the arms of fellow Jews. One day, he held the arm of an 18-year-old girl, dressed in rags, her head shaven, and his life changed. The story he wanted to tell Morris was his love story with that girl, Gita. Morris spent the next three years interviewing Sokolov for the book that details the pair's time together in Auschwitz-Birkenau, documenting how they fell in love while enduring unimaginable hardships and atrocities.

Morris talked to Goodreads about her friendship with the real-life inspiration for her debut novel and how she first imagined the story as a screenplay.

Goodreads: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became a writer.

Heather Morris: I was an avid reader in childhood, not having access to television until I was 12 years old, and I was always drawn to true stories, to autobiographies, to memoirs. Life intervened—work, family—and it wasn't until my children were young adults that I decided to pursue my desire to write.

I studied screenwriting, finding that it was a medium I felt comfortable with. This story was first written as a screenplay by me. It was only when I realized getting a screenplay developed was nigh on impossible that I decided to write it as a novel. My stubborn idea that it had to be told on-screen stopped this story from being told for over ten years.

GR: The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Lale Sokolov, the Slovakian Jew who tattooed concentration-camp numbers onto the arms of newly arrived prisoners. How did you discover this story?

HM: I had written several screenplays based on real events and interesting people that I'd had the privilege to meet. While having coffee with a friend one day, she casually mentioned she had a friend whose mother had recently died and whose father had asked him to find someone to tell "a" story to, and that person couldn't be Jewish. Knowing I wasn't Jewish, she asked me if I would like to meet the gentleman. I said yes.

GR: Why was it important to Lale to find a non-Jewish person to tell his story to?

HM: It was essential to Lale that whoever he told his story to had no baggage, no family connection to the Holocaust. He wanted someone he could tell his story to who could hear it with an open mind. I told him I would be researching as much as I could what he told me. He told me he wouldn't tell me his story if I didn't do my own homework in checking out who he was and what he did in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

GR: I've read that you spent three years recording Lale's story before he died in 2006. Tell me what that experience was like for you.

HM: One of the most humbling of my life, and I'm no spring chicken. That this man who was, let's face it, living history ended up trusting me to tell his story… To get it right. To reveal the evil and horrors he had witnessed and experienced. To tell the world about the girl he fell in love with and then spent 60 years with.

As our relationship changed from ghost writer and subject to friends, we started going out to movies. After all, Lale had to find the perfect actor to play himself. (He settled on Ryan Gosling; he had already decided only Natalie Portman could play Gita.) And he took me to social events, where he would often introduce me as his girlfriend. I attempted to pull him up on this on one occasion, saying in front of others, "Lale, you can't keep calling me your girlfriend, you know I'm married." His face dropped, his sad-puppy look, and he quietly said, "OK, she's not my girlfriend." He peered up with a cheeky grin and continued, "She's my mistress!"

Lale became part of my family. My husband welcomed him into our home and life, and my three adult children fell under his spell. I even let him flirt with my daughter. I took the time to get to know Lale, and importantly he got to know me and my family, and so he opened up. My experience with him is one I will treasure always. I had his story well and truly after 10 to 12 months, and the remainder of our time together was that of friends. I introduced him to a film company, which optioned the screenplay from me, and wonderful times were had by us all as we strove to develop the script. Sadly, it didn't happen in his lifetime. However, stay tuned, as they say.

GR: Why did you decide to write this book as fiction? How does your story differ from the love story between Lale and Gita?

HM: To write the book as a memoir or biography, I would have had to leave out Gita…other than the times she and Lale were together. I wanted to weave their love story into the events, tragedies, and horror that are factually documented from their time in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Lale couldn't remember the names of some of the prisoners he interacted with, and I didn't want to refer to them as Prisoner One or Prisoner Two. I wanted to give them names, so the reader could visualize and relate to them as people. I am lucky to have a videotape of Gita talking of her time in the camp. I have also met a friend of hers who was with her in the camp. So, between the video and Gita's friend's stories, I could write about the pain and suffering the girls endured—something I could not have included if writing it simply as Lale's memoir.

GR: Can you recommend books set during World War II that helped influence the writing of your book?

HM: I deliberately stayed away from academic-based books. The following gave me insight and touched me in different ways, and I would recommend them unreservedly as powerful stories to be read and remembered: Night by Elie Wiesel, My Two Lives by Lotte Weiss, Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne.

GR: What do you hope readers take away from reading your debut?

HM: Never forget. The Holocaust happened. There were survivors. In my story, I have told readers of the love, the hope, and the courage of two people who survived the worst humanity could throw at them. I am lucky that I have a happy ending. A Hollywood ending. A true ending.

Try and live by the motto Lale spent his life living by: If you wake up in the morning, it is a good day.

GR: This book was published earlier this year in Australia and the U.K., where it has become wildly successful (it currently has a 4.39-star rating on Goodreads, with more than 25,700 reviews). Now it's coming to North America. Why do you think this story is resonating with readers?

HM: In April this year, I spent three days in Krakow and Auschwitz-Birkenau with the young Jewish students attending the annual March of the Living. I spoke with hundreds of young people from Australia, North America, the U.K., and South Africa. They were spending a week learning about the price their forebears paid at this particular death camp.

Many of them told me that listening to me talk about Lale and Gita resonated more with them than the statistics being given to them. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust. One-and-a-half million were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau alone. I was telling them a story of just two people. Gita was their age, and they told me that through this microcosm they could somewhat relate to what had happened in the camp. They could picture two people. Feel their pain and deprivation. The history of where they were standing became more real to them. I like to remind people that I have not written the story of the Holocaust. I have written a Holocaust story. The story of Lale and Gita.

GR: What are you currently reading, and what books are you recommending to your friends?

HM: I am currently reading a debut novel by my editor, Angela Meyer—A Superior Spectre. I know I will be highly recommending it when I am finished. The other book I am recommending is also a debut novel, by a young English woman, Kim Sherwood—Testament.

GR: What's next for you? Any preview you can give readers?

HM: So many people have written to me, wanting to know about one of the characters in my book—Cilka. Here is a preview from my next project:

Her beauty saved her life, and condemned her.

Cilka is 16 years old when she is taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in 1942. The commandant at Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, notices her long beautiful hair and forces her separation from the other women prisoners. Cilka learns quickly that power, even unwillingly given, equals survival.

After liberation, Cilka is charged as a collaborator, and sent to Siberia. But had there been choice in her actions? Where do the lines of morality and dignity lie if you are imprisoned in such a place, and still essentially a child?

Entering the Gulag, women are stripped and made to wait, naked, in the snow. Cilka's turn comes, and she is roughly searched. The guard looks at her too long. How can she be back in the situation she was in before? This time, her long hair—all the hair on her body—is shaved off.

She does not realize she will be here for a very, very long time.

But in this unimaginable darkness, this terror beyond terror, she will find endless resources within herself.