As a gesture and an indelible mark she carries with her, Cohen says, “The number is my grandma. To her mind, replicating this number was a means of taking both her grandmother as a person and her grandmother’s legacy forward. Cohen draws meaning from her tattoo in that it signifies her grandmother’s history and her own identity as a descendant of Holocaust survivors. Over the course of Auschwitz’s existence, more than 400,000 prisoners were assigned serial numbers. Cohen is one of a number of the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, more specifically survivors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, who have chosen to replicate their family member’s tattoo on their own body.Īuschwitz, in Nazi-occupied Poland, was the only camp where numbers were tattooed on those prisoners not selected for immediate death. The influence the Holocaust has had through the generations runs deep, and how each descendant of survivors remembers the past and its legacy varies hugely. Her grandfather finished every crumb from every plate. The legacy of starvation was never far from the surface. It permeated family life, as did the self-imposed interdiction on talking about the past and the absence of relatives. It was just always there.Ĭohen, a 41-year-old living in Israel, felt as if she had experienced the Holocaust herself, in a different cycle of her own life. Rony Cohen doesn’t remember any particular moment when she first became aware of the number tattooed on her grandmother’s arm.
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