The novel’s Prologue opens with Lale Sokolov, protagonist and titular character, administering tattoos in the concentration camp known as Auschwitz Two-Birkenau. The girl he is tattooing does not flinch, despite the pain. Lale is hesitant and works slower than usual because “Tattooing the arms of men is one thing; defiling the bodies of young girls is horrifying” (1). Another prisoner named Pepan urges him to hurry as a man in a white coat comes to inspect his work.

Lale finishes tattooing 34902 into her arm. The inspector approves of his work and moves on. Lale and the girl exchange a glance and a smile, and Lale’s “heart seems simultaneously to stop and begin beating for the first time, almost threatening to burst out of his chest” (1). He looks away and she disappears as the next prisoner moves forward to be tattooed. 

Lale Sokolov is one among many Jewish prisoners who has been taken from their homes and is currently being transported in a livestock train car to an unknown destination (though the reader, through Morris’s use of dramatic irony, already knows the destination to be Auschwitz). In an attempt to save his family, Lale volunteered to go to a German work camp in accordance with a new Nazi decree.