Serial numbers.

This is a moving piece about young people, the descendants of Holocaust survivors, having themselves tattooed with their grandparents' concentration camp numbers.

When Eli Sagir showed her grandfather, Yosef Diamant, the new tattoo on her left forearm, he bent his head to kiss it.

Mr. Diamant had the same tattoo, the number 157622, permanently inked on his own arm by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Nearly 70 years later, Ms. Sagir got hers at a hip tattoo parlor downtown after a high school trip to Poland. The next week, her mother and brother also had the six digits inscribed onto their forearms. This month, her uncle followed suit.

“All my generation knows nothing about the Holocaust,” said Ms. Sagir, 21, who has had the tattoo for four years. “You talk with people and they think it’s like the Exodus from Egypt, ancient history. I decided to do it to remind my generation: I want to tell them my grandfather’s story and the Holocaust story.”

This may sound like a strange association, but the first thing I thought on reading this was: it's like they're retweeting the tattoos, into the future.

 

Comments

[rachel]

Wow, not sure how to say what I want without letting all my judgements boil over. Having grown up with my grandfather's tattooed number - and my grandmother's scars - I find this article and the practice to be anything but moving. Fetishistic maybe?

[Bearing]

What makes you say fetishistic? I am reading it as a way to honor their relatives' suffering and maintain the memory of the Holocaust when some want to forget it... But how do you read it?

[rachel]

I think it's an absurd myth that people want or are in any danger of forgetting In a culture where 16-year olds routinely go on labour camp trips, financed by the state and led by schools, the danger seems to me that there is too much idolization and not enough thought or actual study of history. As the ending of the article also hints, there's massive political use of the Holocaust.