We were afraid to ask and afraid to hear. It was impossible to have a conversation about the Holocaust with my father. Yakshi would talk about helping people escape from Slovakia to Hungary – but he never said a word about what he had experienced. Ron’s father, Jakub Reisz – whom everyone knew as Yakshi – said nothing about the Holocaust and, like many children of Holocaust survivors, Ron and his sister knew not to ask. Growing up, no one on the kibbutz had grandparents or spoke about their suffering. “All of them were Holocaust survivors, so all of them have numbers.” “It was a very small community of people with same idea of communism,” he recalls. He grew up in Israel, on a kibbutz founded by Holocaust survivors. That same summer, I spoke with Yair Ron (Reisz), also on Zoom. Video by John Jeffay for The Conversation. Orly Weintraub Gilad tells the story behind her tattoo. One reason for choosing the right arm was because she did not want to see the number “on the side of the heart”. She says she wanted “to do it the same but different”. Her grandfather’s number was on his left arm, but Weintraub Gilad placed her own tattoo on her right arm. The choice of green vines and leaves came from her love of nature. But the resulting composition is as much about her family’s history as it is about their collective future. From different vines emerge letters, the initials of the names of Weintraub Gilad’s husband and her children. The tattoo itself features her grandfather’s number in a nest of leafy green vines. She knows that after she’s gone, that I will talk.” “It starts the conversation and that’s the purpose,” she says, “that’s the thing that my grandmother is so happy about. The tattoo gives her the chance to continue what her mother used to do and talk about the Holocaust. Weintraub Gilad remains very close to her grandmother, who is 95 years old. Weintraub Gilad’s mother, Erica, as a child (right), with her brother Tomy and her parents Samuel and Agi in Romania in the 1960s. Others discussed doing so with their relative, beforehand. Some got the tattoo without seeking approval. Some waited until their survivor parent or grandparent had died. The people I have spoken with have relayed complex and varied decision-making processes behind this potent gesture. Of the 16 people I have spoken with, 13 are from Israel and three from the US.Īs the number of remaining survivors of the Nazi concentration camps grows ever smaller and the Holocaust passes out of living memory, replicating an Auschwitz tattoo becomes an ever more potent gesture about embodied memorialisation and, crucially, familial ties and love. My research delves into the stories of those descendants who, like Cohen, have chosen to replicate a parent or a grandparent’s tattoo on their own body. As a gesture and an indelible mark she carries with her, she says: To her mind, replicating this number was a means of taking her grandmother, as a person, and her legacy forward. In replacing the person’s name, this number has become the visual symbol of the crimes of the Nazis.Ĭohen draws meaning from her tattoo in that it signifies her grandmother’s history and her own identity as a descendant of Holocaust survivors. The Hoberman Collection|AlamyĪuschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, was the only camp where numbers were tattooed on those inmates not selected for immediate death. More than 400,000 prisoners were forcibly tattooed at Auschwitz.
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