A self shooting observational documentary producer/director making engaging, thought-provoking films about real people, often filming over extended timeframes.

Tattooist’s son: Journey to Auschwitz : Synopsis

Duration
1x90’
My Role
Filmed and Directed
Producer
Claire Mundell
Exec Producer Synchronicity Films
Claire Mundell
Adrian Burns
Exec Producer Sky History
Dan Korn
Kathryn Taylor
Exec Producer Screen Scotland
Mark Thomas
Exec Producer Stan. Originals
Alicia Brown
Prod Co
Synchronicity Films
Channel
Sky History
Stan. Originals
Transmission Date
27th January 2025
Year
2025

‘The thought of having to walk through those gates terrifies me. I have tried four times to cross which makes me feel like a coward. Why do I not have the guts to do it?

This is my parents’ history’. (Gary Sokolov)

In this landmark documentary to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz, Gary Sokolov, the only child of ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’, will travel through Slovakia in his family’s footsteps. then to the Nazi death camp in Poland to understand what his parents endured during World War II.

Lali and Gita Sokolov, a Slovakian Jewish couple, met and fell in love in the largest and deadliest of concentration camps. Their story was recently immortalised in the Emmy-nominated Sky/Peacock series ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’, based on the international best-selling book, written by Heather Morris, about Gary’s father.

Growing up in Melbourne, Gary was not told anything of his parents lives before or during Auschwitz; nor of his aunts, uncles and grandparents who were caught up in the Holocaust. It left Gary feeling there was a giant chasm in his life. Then just before he died, his father told him that he wanted to return to Auschwitz. Only now, after seeing the success of the drama series and the book that brought his parents’ story to a global audience, does Gary feel ready to undertake this journey.

Filmed in Melbourne, Slovakia, and Poland, this poignant and intimate one-off documentary features powerful interviews of the real Lali and Gita Sokolov, by USC Shoah Foundation which Gary has never seen. In his quest, Gary meets novelist Heather Morris, actors Jonah Haur-King and Anna Próchniak, who played Lali and Gita in the mini-series, and 100-year-old Auschwitz survivor Abram Goldberg and his family. Along the way he meets Jewish historian Madeline Vadkerty, who details how Gary’s parents, and thousands of Slovakian Jews like them, were rounded up and deported to the death camps in Nazi occupied Poland; and Dr George Halasz, a psychiatrist and pioneer in researching intergenerational Holocaust Trauma, before finally journeying to Auschwitz and Birkenau for the first time, where 1 million Jews and 100,000 others were killed, passing through the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei gatehouse, to confront what his parents survived in order to give life to him.