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Global
Edition - Today's top story: Descendants of Holocaust
survivors explain why they are replicating Auschwitz tattoos
on their own bodies View
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Global
Edition | 26 January 2024 | |
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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 | |
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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Sent: Friday, January 26, 2024 10:15 AM
Subject: Holocaust survivors’ descendants explain their
tattoos
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