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In Jewish tradition, tattooing is largely taboo. For many, an inked mark on the body is as incompatible with Levitical law as it is irreconcilable with the memory of the Holocaust. One million Jews died in Auschwitz. And for the 79 years since the concentration camp complex was liberated on January 27 1945, those who survived – and their children, and their children – have lived with the indelible legacy of the serial numbers the Nazis forcibly tattooed on their forearms.
And yet, a small but growing number of those children and grandchildren are choosing to replicate the numbers on their own bodies. Sociologist Alice Bloch at the University of Manchester, has spent the past five years trying to unpack the potency of this gesture.
In this investigation, Bloch relays the reasons the people she has interviewed have given for wanting, as the son of one Auschwitz survivor puts it, to “walk with the number”. They see their tattoos as living memorials and familial symbols, as love embodied.
For The Conversation Weekly podcast, I spoke to Bloch, and two of her interviewees, David Rubin and Orly Weintraub Gilad. As ever-fewer survivors remain and the Holocaust passes out of living memory, they bear witness to the imperative of finding new ways to never forget what happened.
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Dale Berning Sawa
Commissioning Editor, London
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Orly Weintraub Gilad with her grandfather’s Auschwitz number, A-12599, tattooed on her arm.
John Jeffay for The Conversation
Alice Bloch, University of Manchester
As the Holocaust passes out of living memory, such embodied memorialisation ensures people will still talk about what happened.
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Elizabeth Williams/AP
John E. Jones III, Dickinson College
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Geoffrey Clowes/Shutterstock
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