Specific images of the Holocaust have endlessly punctuated the film and TV landscape: The barbed wire of a concentration camp. Naked bodies rendered to skin and bone, tossed in discarded piles. Gleeful abuse and random killings by evil Nazis. Hollywood has repeatedly ingrained that imagery when presenting this horrific time in history, so to continue conjuring it adds to the collective trauma of an entire people.

Yet all these displays and more are the Sky Studios and Peacock co-production “The Tattooist of Auschwitz.” That makes it a challenging show to sit through, let alone binge six episodes of, when the event series drops on Peacock on May 2.

The series finds inspiration in Heather Morris’ controversial, bestselling 2018 book of the same name. Morris wrote the debut novel after spending time with a Slovakian Holocaust survivor named Lali Sokolov (nee Ludwig Eisenberg), who was a tattooist at Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

The book, and now the show,...