“A” is for Auschwitz

My mother didn’t have a number tattooed on her forearm.

By the time she arrived in Auschwitz, on May 27, 1944, they had stopped tattooing. They resumed a few weeks later.

Neither my father nor his siblings had tattoos. They had fled to U.S.S.R. and were never imprisoned in a German camp.

Nearly all of my parents’ post-war friends had them.

For me, growing up as a cowgirl wanna-be, free to pursue any interest I had (ballet, Girl Scouts, piano lessons), tattoos were just part of life.

They were just there.

I never asked how my family how they got them.

How very strange, in retrospect.

Perhaps I had an inner boundary that I felt I could not cross.

I knew better than to ask if it had been painful.

I never asked if they could be removed or if my relatives even wanted them removed.

The tattoos were just part of them, like their Polish/Romanian/Yiddish accents.

The tattoos somewhat faded over the years.

When I was young, they had been jet-black. You could see them from across the room.

When my aunts and uncles aged and their skin thinned, the marks seemed to become more bluish-green.

Or at least, I hoped they did.