It’s only your own space if you make it yours.
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day this Thursday, I bring you the true-life romance of Lale and Gita Sokolov, a Slovakian couple who met at Auschwitz-Birkenau and defied the odds to not only survive the war but enjoy nearly fifty years of marriage. Prisoner 32407, a.k.a. Lale, fell in love with Prisoner 4562 when he inked her arm. It was a reprehensible job with the unexpected benefits of better food, lodging, and comparative freedom, granted because of his facility with languages. He tried to perform his job as humanely as possible for the thousands of women and children who went under his needle, but his greatest gift to his fellow prisoners was the extra food and medicines he was able to purchase with jewels and money smuggled out of the intake processing center where Gita’s friends worked.
This best-seller, published in 2018, is so carefully researched that the conversations are word-for-word based on Lale’s recollections. But truth really does seem stranger than fiction when it comes to his almost cavalier relationship with the guard responsible for him. They have a semi-teasing banter and Lale is eventually entrusted to travel alone between the men’s and women’s camps to conduct business and see his beloved—with bribes for her overseer. It felt almost too Hogan’s Heroes at times, which left me wondering if Lale had come to embroider his truth with time or if the regimented inhumanity of concentration camp life did indeed have its chinks and he was just fortunate enough to have fallen into one. Regardless, I enjoyed this quick read enough to pick up the sequel, Cilka’s Journey, which tells the saga of Gita’s beautiful girlfriend who was subsequently imprisoned in a Russian Gulag for her forced fraternization with the Nazis.
For a detailed summary of Lale and Gita’s story, watch this seven-minute summary.