Holography: Addendum

Sunday I was watching a Discovery program called Rocky Mountain Railroad (10 years in the tropics has made Canada look like paradise) and a man in his early twenties, enthusiastic about his job with Canadian Rail, rolled up his sleeve to show off his employee number, what looked like eight digits, tattooed on his forearm. All I could do was shake my head. Think of all the numbers, social security and bank accounts and PINs, that we all have to memorize. The young man admitted that his job is very important to him, and that he plans to make a lifelong career out of it. But even this doesn't excuse him. No one but an idiot who has never heard of the Nazi concentration camps, in which inmates had their prisoner numbers tattooed on their forearms, would get a tattoo of their employee number, social security number, or a girlfriend's cell number on his forearm. Do a Google search for "who had numbers tattooed on their forearms?" You won't see a photo of that Canadian guy.

So I gave the kid a little credit, but not much, by thinking that maybe he got the tattoo in all innocence, that he did not know about the tattooed forearms of concentration camp inmates. But that doesn't pardon him either: knowing about those inmates' tattoos and getting a tattoo of your own anyway; or living 74 years after the end of the war against fascism that someone in your family, a grandfather perhaps, took part in and not know anything about those tattoos? It's unlikely that the young man has not seen one of the X-Men movies. In the very first installment, set in "Poland 1944," the boy who would grow up to be "Magneto" notices the tattoos on the forearms of the prisoners. Does it ultimately matter where we get our information, as long as we are informed? As I argued in my previous post, I have to believe that it does.

In his relentlessly shattering book, If This is a Man, Primo Levi recounts his "Initiation" into his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz:

"Häftling [prisoner]: I have learnt that I am a Häftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.

"The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us all in a row, and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is the real, true initiation: only by "showing one's number" can one get bread and soup. Several days passed, and not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder the daily operation of food-distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language. And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, its number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.

"Only much later, and slowly, a few of us learnt something of the funereal science of the numbers of Auschwitz, which epitomize the stages of destruction of European Judaism. To the old hands of the camp, the numbers told everything: the period of entry into the camp, the convoy of which one formed a part, and consequently the nationality. Everyone will treat with respect the numbers from 30,000 to 80,000: there are only a few hundred left and they represent the few survivals from the Polish ghettos. It is as well to watch out in commercial dealings with a 116,000 or a 117,000: they now number only about forty, but they represent the Greeks of Salonica, so take care they do not pull the wool over your eyes. As for the high numbers, they carry an essentially comic air about them, like the words "freshman" or "conscript" in ordinary life. The typical high number is a corpulent, docile and stupid fellow: he can be convinced that leather shoes are distributed at the infirmary to all those with delicate feet, and can be persuaded to run there and leave his bowl of soup "in your custody"; you can sell him a spoon for three rations of bread; you can send him to the most ferocious of the Kapos to ask him (as happened to me!) if it is true that his is the Kartoffe/schalen-kommando, the "Potato Peeling Command," and if one can be enrolled in it."