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Suswatibasu (1703 KP) rated The Tattooist of Auschwitz in Books

Mar 2, 2018 (Updated Mar 2, 2018)

The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Heather Morris | 2018 | Biography, History & Politics, Religion

8.7

(74 Ratings)

Book Rating

Wish it hadn't been written like a screenplay

The Tattooist of Auschwitz reads like a fictional story set during the Holocaust, but what makes it remarkable is the fact that it is anything but formulated.

Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, was given the task of tattooing identification numbers on others at the notorious concentration camp. There he meets Gita, another Slovakian, and he sets himself on a mission to escape with her to freedom by trading food and jewels, revealing his incredible street smarts. If he had been caught, he would have been killed - many owed him their survival.

There are elements where you do think it has been written for the screen, as the scenes fail to connect to one another fluidly. As a result, I did believe it to be a fictional story because the writing failed to completely flourish and the author struggles with the prose. In this respect, it is rather disappointing, however, the memoir is wonderful and it leaves you with huge respect for the Sokolovs.

Kudos

Awix (3310 KP) rated Dracula (English) (1931) in Movies

Feb 11, 2020

The first official screen version of Dracula has a reputation for being sluggish and stagey that is not entirely undeserved; we should bear in mind it was adapted from a play and released at a time when some cinemas were still not wired for sound (a silent version with intertitles was produced from the same footage). Nevertheless this is in many ways the version of the story that nearly all the others have been made in response to, whether they are riffing on it or reacting against it.

It's slow, and camp, and there are some interesting performance styles on display, but every now and then a moment slips through which is genuinely interesting, and which you can tell has inspired some of the movies that followed. Virtually no actual blood or visual horror, of course, but then it's not in and of itself actually scary. It is, however, the template and raw material from which most other Dracula movies (and many other vampire movies) have been drawn, and worth watching just for that reason.