The TV series The Tattoo Artist at Auschwitz is coming to Stan, Sky, Peacock, starring Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey

The tattoo artist of Auschwitzthe best-selling novel by New Zealand-born, Melbourne-based author Heather Morris is being adapted into a six-part TV series for Stan.

The co-production with Britain’s Sky and America’s Peacock is currently filming in Europe, with a cast led by Englishman Jonah Hauer King and Polish actress Anna Prochniak as Lale and Gita, Slovak Jews who meet and fall in love in Auschwitz before they settle in Australia after the war.

New Zealand actress Melanie Lynskey, who rose to fame as a teenager opposite Kate Winslet in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Beings and will soon be featured in the second season of Yellow jackets, plays the author. Israeli filmmaker Tali Shalom Ezer is directing.

Morris, a former social worker, wrote the book after being introduced to Holocaust survivor Lale Sokolov in 2003 as someone who “had a story that might be worth telling.” (The writer serves as a story consultant for the series.)

British production company Synchronicity bought the film rights in 2018, before the book – which has reportedly sold 12 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages ​​- had even been published. Soon after, Jacquelin Perske, the award-winning co-creator of love my way and writer of the TV series The Screamwas tapped to adjust it for the screen.

But the bestseller has also drawn its fair share of criticism, accused of factual errors and perpetuating Holocaust clichés. Perske says she’s already preparing for the backlash that will inevitably greet her version of the story.

“I think in the last four or five years the world has changed quite a bit, the idea of ​​telling stories like that has changed,” she says. “But I don’t really want to get into debates about this stuff at this point. I’d rather see how the show is made, see it out there and then we see what happens with the debates, which are going to be huge.”

She doesn’t invite or hope for it. She is simply aware that for some people, the Holocaust does not lend itself to drama at all, as liberties are inevitably taken and the grim truth is diminished for the sake of history.