Coming to Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW this May, The Tattooist of Auschwitz is a limited series based on Heather Morris’s best-selling book of the same name. The series is inspired by the real-life story of Lali and Gita Sokolov, who met while prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust of World War II.

Jonas Nay plays Stefan Baretzki, a volatile Nazi SS Officer who is assigned to keep a close guard over Lali. Read on to hear more from Jonas Nay about playing the role:

“It wasn’t easy because of everything I learned about him. There are even recordings of him at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in 1960, during which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. It was very disturbing to hear him try to defend what he did. At certain points I had to stop, I couldn’t bear to continue to listen to him anymore.

“His life was so different from anything I have experienced: he grew up with a violent father; he fled home as a young man and left his sisters behind; he was put in a position of great power, as an Auschwitz guard, at a very young age. The more I found out, the more I realised it was going to be a hard journey to embody this character.

“I didn’t have to prepare physically – unlike many of the other actors, I didn’t have to shave my head – but the mental preparation was heavy. Being German, I’m very well-informed on the Holocaust as it is omnipresent during history lessons at school. I did intense research on Auschwitz, specifically on young SS officers who worked there during that period of time. I talked to Heather Morris on the phone and then again when she came to the set in Bratislava. A lot of what Lali told Heather didn’t make it into the original book, so some of that information found its way into my performance.”

“I’m thankful for the preparation time I had with Tali and Jonah. We ran some intense scenes in a small room and I had to get into Baretzki’s really brutal and sadistic relationship with Lali. I loved working with Tali; she’s so focussed on performances, in a really artistic way. She didn’t make me feel alone because of the character I was playing. I always felt valued. We talked about the fact that we weren’t creating a caricature of Baretzki. He’s volatile. It’s hard to anticipate what he does next. He is always somewhere between brutal, drunk, high on amphetamines, close to a tantrum. He can switch in an instant. Tali explored all these aspects of his character with me so that I could get my head around playing a character that embodies pure evil.”

“There was one scene in particular that I was afraid of from day one. I was doing a very sadistic thing to Lali. I don’t want to spoil anything, but Lali doesn’t react as Baretzki expected him to and so Baretzki has a tantrum, grabs a child and covers the child’s mouth and nose so he can’t breathe. I was afraid of giving the child actor nightmares so I asked if I could meet him beforehand. I turned the whole thing into a game – he also covered my mouth and nose in rehearsal – and hopefully the scene wasn’t so overwhelming for him. The first time I walked on set in a Nazi uniform was awful too. There was no escaping the fact that I was a German playing a Nazi who did abhorrent things.”

“I went jogging along the river in Bratislava just to get the stress hormones out of my body. I also brought my music studio with me. I have a second life as a music composer for film and so I got on with that. Sitting in front of a keyboard most evenings was a nice way of exiting into a totally different creative world. Jonah is a musician too, so we talked about music between scenes as a distraction from the weird dynamic our characters had with each other.

“I asked myself that question at the start of the production. Are there enough masterpieces about the Holocaust already? But then I thought of a younger generation who maybe haven’t seen those masterpieces and I realised how important it is to keep telling those stories.”