105 pages • 3 hours read
Heather MorrisThe Tattooist of Auschwitz
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 25-27 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 25 Summary
Gita and Cilka, along with the other women, are marching through the snow. They have not seen Cilka or Ivana. They march all day, their number steadily dwindling as women fall to exhaustion. At night, Dana falls to her knees, too exhausted to go on. Gita stays with her. Dana tells four Polish girls to take Gita away. Dana is left behind.
At daybreak, they reach a field where cattle wagons are waiting. Gita makes a break for it with the Polish girls. They run to a nearby house as the Nazis load the wagons with prisoners. The homeowners give them hot drinks and bread. The man of the house says they cannot stay, though he does remove the red slashes from the back of their coats. The man “gives them the address of a relative in a nearby village, as well as a supply of bread and a blanket” (215).
En route to the address they are given, they ask a woman for directions. She kindly escorts them. The woman in the house they arrive at is horrified, as the helpful woman is a senior SS officer.
An older woman “makes a fuss over the girls, taking them into the kitchen, sitting them at the table” (216). She gives them soup and showers them with questions.
Gita and the Polish girls spend the night in the attic of the older woman’s neighbor. They are afraid the SS woman will report them. They spend nights in the attic and days hiding in the woods. A local priest’s parishioners bring them food. They run into a Russian soldier, who places a guard outside their safehouse.
They become complacent with their new arrangements. One night, a drunk Russian soldier bursts in and attempts to rape one of the girls. Her screams attract other soldiers, one of whom shoots the attacker in the head. The soldiers apologize profusely. The girls know it’s time to move on. As an apology, a Russian officer arranges a truck to take them to Krakow, where one of the Polish girl’s sister lives.
Gita eventually finds her way to a convoy going back to Bratislava, Slovakia. She knows that most of her family is likely dead, but hopes at least one of her brothers survived.
Survivors in Bratislava are given shared apartments. One afternoon, she sees two Russian soldiers hop the fence. They are her brothers, Doddo and Latslo. They reunite, though she saves the news that their family has been murdered for another day.
Chapter 26 Summary
Lale’s train moves on. He has risked bringing some gems with him. The train finally stops after an interval of time. According to a man named Joseph, they have arrived in “‘Mauthausen, in Austria. Not quite as terrible as Birkenau, but nearly’” (221).
At this new concentration camp, they are strip-searched the next morning. Lale manages to hide his three largest diamonds under his tongue and pass inspection. He waits around for several weeks with nothing to do but watch the SS. He befriends a guard who offers to transfer him to “a subcamp of Mauthausen, at Saurer-Werke in Vienna” (223). This camp does not house Jews, so Lale will have to keep his identity secret. Lale gives him a diamond as a parting gift.
The guards at the next camp seem largely indifferent. Lale can only think of Gita. There are no other Jews or Slovaks in the camp, so Lale keeps to himself. One day, two boys ask him if he was the tattooist at Auschwitz. Soon after, SS march him to a building, where he is questioned by officials. Lale claims he’s Catholic. When pressed, he starts to remove his pants to prove it, but the presiding officer stops him. Outside, he learns it is April 23. He has been a prisoner for three years. Lale vows: “You’ve taken three years from my life. You will not have one more day” (225).
Lale promptly finds a weak spot in the fence and walks out into the forest. He hears the sounds of battle in the distance. He crosses a freezing river, drifting into the crossfire of the battling Russian and German armies. Exhausted, he drags himself ashore and passes out.
Chapter 27 Summary
Lale wakes to the sound of the river and marching soldiers. They are Russian, but they are indifferent and even hostile to him, and have not heard of Auschwitz. He decides to walk in the opposite direction, away from the German Army the Russians are preparing to engage.
A jeep pulls up, and a Russian officer questions him. Noting Lale’s multilingual prowess, he tells Lale the Russians have a job for him. Lale gets in the jeep and is taken to a large chalet overlooking a beautiful valley. The inside of the chalet is opulent.
The officer takes him to a higher Russian official, who agrees that Lale’s ability to speak German and Russian fluently will serve them well. He is taken to a room with a full wardrobe of men’s clothing and an adjoining bathroom.
The room’s clothing is comprised of suits and shirts “and all the accessories to resurrect the Lale of old” (230). Lale finds a suit and shirt that will be perfect, as well as underwear and a pair of shoes. He then draws a bath and luxuriates for a time, “in no hurry for his first bath in three years to end” (230).
Lale’s minder returns and introduces him to Friedrich, the man who will be responsible for guarding Lale and shooting him if he chooses to run. Lale’s new job will be to find young women in the village to party with and sexually entertain the Russians. He will go to the village each day with advance payment and proposition any women he can. Lale eats his first good meal in three years that evening. Gita’s absence prevents him from completely enjoying it.
The next day, after breakfast, Lale obtains the day’s payments and heads out into the village with Friedrich. Lale must proposition any young women he finds and find out what their price is. Luckily for Lale, all of the women he finds in the first shop he goes to have played this game with the Russians before. He quickly picks up the requisite number of women. That night, he hears the sounds of partying from the lower floors of the chalet. He is satisfied that the women are, at least, not being mistreated.
This routine continues for several weeks. Lale becomes popular with the women in the village. One asks him to marry her once the war is over. He declines, as his heart still belongs to Gita.
That evening, Lale is overtaken by homesickness. While counting jewels he has gradually stolen over the past few weeks, Friedrich comes knocking. Lale fails to notice a large ruby on the floor. Friedrich immediately notices, but Lale is able to smooth it over. The Russian has come to tell Lale that he has been transferred. Lale is trusted enough to go to the village on his own for now on.
The next day, “Lale showers and dresses in his chosen clothes, including four pairs of underpants and three pairs of socks” (240). He takes extra money and obtains permission to return late.
He ditches the jeep in the village and steals a bicycle. On the way out of town, Russian soldiers confiscate the bike. Lale walks the rest of the day, taking refuge in a mostly empty train station that night. Lale pays the helpful stationmaster with a diamond and waits in a train that night. He waits for the train, whose destination is Bratislava, to leave in six hours. By morning, he is back in his old city.
Chapters 25-27 Analysis
Chapters 25, 26, and 27 depict Gita’s and Lale’s individual escapes from their captors as the Nazi’s power structure begins to crumble under pressure of the advancing Russian army. Much of what the Nazis did during the Holocaust was done in secret, under codenames and behind closed doors; they attempted to avoid the scrutiny of the rest of the world. At the very last, when it was evident that the Russian troops could not be stopped, they ramped up their efforts to exterminate their prisoners. When this failed, they began the “evacuation” of Auschwitz and other death camps. This is what causes Lale and Gita’s initial separation.
This section of the novel deals largely with the effects of war on people outside the concentration camps. Lale and Gita were cut off from the outside world, save for chance encounters with people they knew from their old life. Now they get to see how Europe has changed.
While the Russian soldiers seem like saviors while they are imprisoned in Auschwitz, their encounters with them outside show their flaws. War tends to breed cruelty, though the cruelty they experience is tempered with kindness. One of Gita’s Polish friends is nearly raped by a deranged Russian soldier; however, the others execute him and show kindness by taking Gita back to Bratislava. The Russian officers Lale ends up with in Austria echo the SS officers in many ways; they threaten to execute Lale if he does not comply. However, they treat him as a human being, and give him good clothes and food.
The women of the Austrian village where Lale acts as a pimp show that morals and values change during times of duress, and not just in the concentration camps. Because their men have all gone off to war, they turn to prostitution in order to make ends meet. While this may seem to be morally unsound by peacetime standards, survival again becomes the chief directive. One cannot feed oneself on morality; therefore, in this context, they are doing nothing wrong.
