The tattoist of Auschwitz 

Today I have started reading this book.

I cannot find the reason why the stories that are written about this near and dark moment attract me. Sometimes I think that it´s because in my adolescence I was interned in an institution whose objective was to annul the will of those who passed through that gate, they said, to become an upstanding citizen. Other times I reckon that in the novels that I read – very few - and in the movies that I saw - many more – I was able to understand, as if it were a parallel world, some of the miseries of men.

I don't know what I'm going to find in this book and I'm a bit suspicious; I´ve to admit that if in the bookshop I´d seen the photographs that appear in the last pages, perhaps I wouldn´t have bought it. Why? Because it chees me off that sappy way with which some writers and editors adorn a work in order to increase sales.

In the first chapter, April 1942, we´re introduced to the protagonist, well dressed, inside a stinking and crowded train carriage, engaging in conversation with various 'passengers' showing, I´d say, an uncommon impassiveness and self-confidence in relation to the situation he´s experiencing.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI, marked 32407, naked, numbered one, uniformed in an old Russian suit and assigned to Block 7. It´s on this first night in the extermination camp that he sees the macabre fun of those fucking bastards who felt superior and owners of Europe.

 

From my Borstal.

LDR

 

 

The tattooist of Auschwitz.- Morris, Heather.- Zaffre, London, 2018