He got his big break starring as Prince Eric in the live-action version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid opposite Halle Bailey.

Now Jonah Hauer-King takes on his most challenging role to date – a prisoner in Auschwitz.

“Your head being shaved in the prison uniform that you’re putting on every day and going to that set is very impactful,” Hauer-King tells Sky News.

The British actor plays a young version of Lali Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew who was forced to become a tattooist of his fellow prisoners at the most infamous concentration camp during the Second World War.

Hauer-King, 28, says seeing the set “felt so eerie and so frightening” and despite protections being in place during the show’s production, it was impossible to walk away unaffected.

“I don’t know if you ever really let go of it. At the end of the day, I think it does stay with you because no matter how much you tell yourself that this is a safe and controlled environment, I think you’d have to be quite numb for it not to be quite impactful”.

Is the Tattooist of Auschwitz a true story?

The six-part series is adapted from a Heather Morris’ novel of the same name which was informed by a real-life story.

The New Zealand author developed a friendship with Lali Sokolov in 2003 and over the course of three years, he shared with her the story of his life in the concentration camp where historians estimate more than one million Jews died.

Living in Slovakia, Sokolov was conscripted during the Second World War and sent to Auschwitz for forced labour. He tattooed identification numbers onto fellow prisoners in the concentration camp. One of whom Gita Furman, he fell in love with.

There had been queries around the authenticity of the novel when it was first released.

Morris says: “This is a work of fiction based on the memory of one man. It is not the story of the Holocaust. My novel is not an academic, historical account. So many survivors have thanked me for telling Lali and Gita’s story – they see it, in many ways, as their story too.”

Told over six episodes, Sokolov is portrayed in two timelines – as a young man he’s played by Hauer-King, while Oscar nominee Harvey Keitel portrays the moments he told his life story to Morris.

Hauer-King says he is appreciative that the story is told in this way.

“So often these stories end when it was liberated or at the end of the war, and there’s some closure. And any kind of traumatic experience, as we know, doesn’t work like that – you carry it for a lifetime.

“The physical scars are there, the emotional scars are there and it’s passed on to the next generation and even the next one.”

Anna Prochniak plays Gita Furman and says having her head shaved and being in the environment was a “very profound and very powerful” experience.

“We have to keep telling stories like this. We have to respect the personal stories. We have to remember and draw attention to the victims of the Holocaust and the Holocaust survivors. We have to remember what we can and be aware of that”.

She adds: “The ultimate message of the show for me is that we can choose love over hate and love is the strongest power we have access to.”

‘The actors were starving and shivering’

German actor Jonas Nay plays Stefan Baretzki, a brutal SS Nazi officer. He says putting on the uniform each morning and sharing the screen with starving, shivering castmates was a stark reminder of the tragic events.

“Jonah Hauer-King who plays Lali was starving beforehand, so he got really, really thin and he was shivering in his prison gown beside me. And there were already hundreds of extras waiting, shivering in prison gowns and you’re the one in the boots and in this uniform.

“It was an unbelievably heavy weight on your shoulders, especially knowing that so many people in the crew had Jewish relatives, a Jewish background and it was really, really hard to carry.”

Morris is depicted by Melanie Lynskey, the Yellowjackets actress who was taken aback by the real story.

“It’s such an incredible thing to think of being in the worst place imaginable,” she says. “One of the worst times in history and finding the love of your life. It’s a very complicated thing”.

Most of the filming took place in Bratislava, in Slovakia.

Renowned film composer Hans Zimmer co-created the music with Kara Talve for the limited series.

Zimmer was born in Germany and his mother was a refugee who escaped the Nazis in 1938 and fled to England.

He says he “grew up with the fear” and it is the job of filmmakers and storytellers to “remind humanity that love is the only cure to this evil”.

The closing credits song is performed by Barbra Streisand – her first-ever recording for a TV series.

An EGOT – the winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony award – Streisand says it was an important project to be part of.

“Because of the rise in antisemitism around the world today, I wanted to sing Love Will Survive in the context of this series, as a way of remembering the six million souls who were lost less than 80 years ago.

“And also, to say that even in the darkest of times, the power of love can triumph and endure.”

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is available on Sky Atlantic and streaming on NOW.

Hutchinson has unveiled what it claims is the “fastest gravel tyre on the market” as a part of its new line-up of Caracal gravel tyres.

That title, it claims, goes to the Caracal Race but it is also joined in the new line-up by a standard version with added puncture protection, to strike “a more versatile balance of performance and durability”.

The release continues what has been a busy year for the French brand, having unveiled its “fastest ever” road tyre, the Blackbird, in March. It was headlined by the introduction of a range of new tech and Hutchinson has drawn on this technology once again for the Caracal Race, which has adopted the same SwiftEasy casing and Mach Tread 3.0 compound. This tech is absent from the regular Caracal which uses the Bi-Compound that has been a regular feature on its other gravel tyres, including the Touareg and Tundra.

Both tyres are available solely in a 700x40c size and a tan sidewall colour, although the regular Caracal has a black sidewall version available too.

Read more: Raceday becomes ENVE’s ‘fastest-ever’ SES tyre

Hutchinson Caracal Race: Meeting “the needs of increasingly high paced elite gravel riding”

While the new Caracal range consists of two tyres, it is the Race that will inevitably steal the headlines.

Hutchinson says that it created the tyre with one goal in mind: “to serve their elite teams and athletes by creating the fastest gravel tyre on the market”. If its testing is anything to go by, it appears to have not only achieved that, but blown most other race tyres away. According to Hurchinson, it outperforms similar performance tyres “by up to 35%”. This figure goes up to 40% when compared to the Overide which the Caracal has superseded as Hutchinson’s top-tier gravel tyre. The French brand hasn’t actually specifically defined what “performance” is in this instance.

Either way, its performance credentials are reaffirmed by the ‘Racing Lab’ moniker that it carries. This is applied to Hutchinson’s top-performing tyres that are hand-made in France, like the recently released Blackbird. The Blackbird was significant for multiple reasons, not least because Hutchinson had been quiet on the road tyre market for a number of years, but also because it debuted a host of new technology, including SwiftEasy casing and MachTread 3.0 compound. Both of these have made a return on the Caracal Race, and they’re pivotal to delivering the tyre’s world-leading performance, Hutchinson says.

Read more: Vittoria releases its ‘most durable and puncture resistant road tyre ever’ with the RideArmor

For the SwiftEasy casing, this is to the tune of 40% less rolling resistance, compared to other semi-slick gravel tyres in Hutchinson’s line-up. This is achieved through a slightly different process to regular casing which usually overlap at the centre of the tread, with the casing instead bonded to the outer layer of the tyre.

MachTread 3.0 delivers an array of further performance benefits, according to Hutchinson, including “75% better performance in tear tests, all without compromising on grip”.

The Caracal Race doesn’t benefit from the same level of puncture protection as other tyres, hence Hutchinson’s direction that it is “best reserved exclusively for races on hard packed gravel or for all-road performance riding”, but that extra level of protection is provided by the standard Caracal instead.

The Caracal Race tips the scales at a claimed 475g, which is reasonable, although there are plenty of tyres that undercut that figure.

Hutchinson Caracal: Performance with extra puncture protection

Unlike its cousin, the standard Caracal forgoes the newer technology, but it still shares the same race-oriented focus, only with a little extra puncture protection. In fact, Hutchinson says that it ranks above its existing tyres in its performance hierarchy, falling below only the Caracal Race.

The main similarity between the two tyres, Hutchinson says, is the “fast rolling tread pattern”. Beyond that, the standard Caracal shares more similarities with the other tyres in Hutchinson’s range, including the bi-compound. This combines flexible sidewalls with a harder central compound.

Added puncture protection is delivered by the hardskin layer, which goes from bead-to-bead for complete tyre coverage. It’s technology that was originally used for mountain bike tyres but is an ever-present throughout Hutchinson’s gravel range, barring the Caracal Race.

Despite the added puncture protection, the tyre weighs the same as the Race at 475g.

The Caracal Race will cost €59.99 while the Caracal will retail for €54.99. Check out the full range on Hutchinson’s website.

Keep up to date with the latest tech news on the GCN website

HashiCorp has released version 1.8 of Terraform, their infrastructure-as-code language. The release introduces provider-defined functions. This enables the creation of custom functions within a given provider that handle computational-style tasks. Several providers, including AWS, GCP, and Kubernetes, have introduced new provider-defined functions alongside this release. Version 1.8 also introduces improvements to refactoring across resource types.

Provider-defined functions can be used in any Terraform expression with the following calling syntax: provider::provider_name::function_name(). These functions can perform several tasks, including data transformation, parsing data, assembling data, and simplifying validations and assertions.

Coinciding with the release of Terraform 1.8, several Terraform providers have been updated to include provider-defined functions. The 5.40 release of the Terraform AWS provider now has provider-defined functions to parse and build ARNs (Amazon Resource Names). For example, arn_parse can be used to retrieve the account ID for a given resource:

# create an ECR repository
resource "aws_ecr_repository" "hashicups" {
  name = "hashicups"
  
  image_scanning_configuration {
    scan_on_push = true
  }
}
 
# output the account ID of the ECR repository
output "hashicups_ecr_repository_account_id" {
  value = provider::aws::arn_parse(aws_ecr_repository.hashicups.arn).account_id
}

Included in the 5.23 release of the Terraform Google Cloud provider is a function to parse regions, zones, names, and projects from resource IDs that are not managed within the Terraform configuration.

resource "google_cloud_run_service_iam_member" "example_run_invoker_jane" {
  member   = "user:jane@example.com"
  role     = "run.invoker"
  service  = provider::google::name_from_id(var.example_cloud_run_service_id)
  location = provider::google::location_from_id(var.example_cloud_run_service_id)
  project  = provider::google::project_from_id(var.example_cloud_run_service_id)
}

The 2.28 release of the Terraform Kubernetes provider includes a provider-defined function for encoding and decoding Kubernetes manifests into Terraform.

resource "kubernetes_manifest" "example" {
  manifest = provider::kubernetes::manifest_decode(file("${path.module}/manifest.yaml"))
}

Version 2.30.0 of the HashiCorp Terraform extension for Visual Studio Code includes syntax highlighting and auto-completion support for provider-defined functions.

OpenTofu, the recent fork of Terraform, has indicated that they will be adding support for provider-defined functions. User janosdebugs posted in the OpenTofu GitHub repo that “provider-implemented functions have been presented to the TSC [Technical Steering Committee] and is being planned for OpenTofu 1.8.”. At the time of writing, OpenTofu is on version 1.6.2.

The release also introduces new functionality to move supported resources between resource types in a faster and less error-prone manner. This enhances the moved block behavior to support moving between resources of different types if the target resource type declares it can be converted from the source resource type. Providers can add this support to handle various use cases such as renaming a provider or splitting a resource.

Terraform 1.8 is available now from GitHub or within Terraform Cloud. More details about the release can be found on the HashiCorp blog, the upgrade guide, and in the changelog.