In The Tattooist of Auschwitz, 28-year-old Hauer-King plays Lali Sokolov, a Jewish prisoner in the camp who was given the task of tätowierer, tattooing identification numbers on the arms of his fellow prisoners. Through the course of the story, Lali meets and falls in love with Gita Furman (Anna Próchniak), and is befriended by one of his captors, Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay).

The precarious balance that sits at the heart of The Tattooist of Auschwitz is the idea that it is both a historical drama about the Holocaust, and that it is also, simultaneously, a love story. The two do not necessarily go comfortably in hand, intertwining positivity and hope with the horror of what is happening around Lali and Gita within the confines of Auschwitz.

“We wanted to encompass both,” Hauer-King says. “What the book does so beautifully is paint a picture of this man and this extraordinary love that he has. I think that’s a massive part of why people are so drawn in, because you have these two people that you’re so invested in, and their love and their relationship is happening in the most extraordinary circumstances.

“It’s no wonder that people respond to that because it’s a glimmer of light in so much darkness,” Hauer-King says. “At the same time, on screen you have the capacity to have more facets to the story, and I think it was important for us to portray certain aspects of the camp that may or may not have been as visible in the book. We were all very wary of in any way diluting the context or the circumstances.”

The series, which was written by Australian screenwriter Jacquelin Perske with Gabbie Asher and Evan Placey, also includes a present-day narrative, in which the elderly Lali (Harvey Keitel) is telling his story to a biographer, Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey), in Melbourne.

Morris wrote the book on which the series is based and was a consultant to the television adaptation. The book was singled out for some criticism after its publication for perceived inaccuracies in the narrative and, notably, Sokolov’s son Gary told The New York Times the book had misspelt his father’s name as Lale.

The realities of the filming schedule – essentially, that the older Lali’s scenes were filmed after production on the main sequence of the story had wrapped – meant that Hauer-King did not share the set with Keitel. “There were certain aspects of it that we wanted to be similar in terms of his spirit and his compassion and slightly smaller idiosyncratic things,” Hauer-King says, of sharing the role with 84-year-old Keitel. “But we also weren’t worried about trying to create two exact versions.”

There was also a sense that the man Lali was in Auschwitz would have been a very different man to the man he was when he was in his 80s, Hauer-King adds. “And because so much of the story is about his memory, it takes on a different tone somehow.”

One thing that was clear to both actors, perhaps, is the depth of survivor’s guilt which Lali felt, having survived a horror which claimed so many lives. “That’s a massive part of it, and that develops more and more as the series goes on, that the survivor’s guilt and the trauma that you get so clearly from Lali in his 80s, that is very much something that is born when he was there [in the camp],” Hauer-King says.

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The series does contain a line – “It was a terrible place, not just for what was done to us, but what it made us into” – which captures acutely the discomfort of living what would have seemed like a privileged life, while surrounded by so much horror.

The line “very succinctly” captures the bleak reality of survival, Hauer-King says: “When people are put in these awful, impossible situations, their survival instinct kicks in and wanting to help those around them kicks in, and they have to do things that they would never otherwise do, because they’re put in positions that we can’t possibly imagine.”

Particularly challenging is the friendship of Lali and Stefan Baretzki, his captor. “It’s arguably the most nuanced, grey-area relationship of the whole series because the power dynamic is so fascinating,” Hauer-King says. “There’s a line at the end of the series where Lali says, ‘The rescuer is a monster, and yet I’m here because of him.’ And what that does to someone’s psychology, knowing that they’re probably alive because of that person, I can’t even imagine.

“I think Lali is very clear that this is an awful man, but I think in the first instance, he’s aware of the game that he has to play, of trying to watch Baretzki and understand how, from his very, very lowly position, he can manipulate the situation,” Hauer-King adds. “If someone is killing people around you, but then ultimately saves your life, trying to make sense of that is really difficult.

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“Their relationship is one of captor and captive,” Hauer-King says. “And yet in my mind, there’s a weird obsession, admiration, interest in Lali that Baretzki can’t shake. He strangely looks up to him in some kind of way. We wanted to lean into that because we thought that was interesting, and it’s definitely not black and white. I think Lali struggled with that for the rest of his life.”

The Tattooist of Auschwitz streams on Stan from Thursday, May 2.

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