In the face of mass suffering, what would I do?
This dilemma is at the heart of Tony Bernard’s riveting new book, The Ghost Tattoo.
When we first meet Bernard’s father, Henry Bieryanski Bernard, he is a successful general practitioner, with occasional sour moods and strange behaviors, in a middle-class suburb of Sydney, Australia. Bernard knows his father survived a concentration camp because his tattooed number is clearly visible on his arm. Though Henry rarely talks about his gruesome experiences during the war, as Bernard grows older, he realizes that his father is haunted by memories of that time.
In 1970, Henry went to Darmstadt, Germany to testify as a witness in a war crimes tribunal of Nazis. Bernard was unsure why his father was called to this particular trial or against whom he was testifying.
Later, Bernard traveled with his father to his hometown shtetl of Tomaszów, Poland. He learned that before the war, one-third of the town was Jewish, yet today there are no Jews. They also visited Treblinka, where his grandmother is buried, and Auschwitz. Yet Bernard still didn’t understand what was gnawing at his father.
Only when Henry approaches his elder years does he reveal his true story, with a great outpouring of grief and regret. As Bernard writes, “Having spent half a century holding his silence, he spent the final quarter-century of his life in a great hurry to tell his story in as much detail as he possibly could before he left us.”
Bernard witnesses his father in a “wrestling match with his conscience.” The skilled author peels back the many layers of his father’s story slowly and meticulously, like layers of onion skin, leading the reader to the core of his bitter discovery.
When the Nazis occupy Tomaszów, Henry’s mother tried to save her two sons by giving them forged documents and her diamond earrings for food and bribes. Knowing his life depended on it, Henry assiduously stored her diamond in his mouth, his underwear, and other secret places. His mother was deported to Treblinka, a camp whose sole purpose was extermination. Henry, his girlfriend Halina, and his brother were sent to Bliżyn, a labor camp. When the Nazis found the forged documents, Henry was arrested, beaten, and threatened with execution. As the Russians advanced, Bliżyn was evacuated, and Henry was sent to Auschwitz and eventually to Dachau.
During the last weeks of the war, when the Americans started bombing, Henry saw the “slow disintegration of the Nazi state.” He was liberated by the Americans on April, 27, 1945 and made his way to Australia.
As Bernard accompanies his father to the sites of his father’s childhood and imprisonment, he realizes that these “were not sentimental journeys … they were steady descents into silence, misery and profound unresolved grief.”
When Bernard finally pieces together his family’s history in Tomaszów, he begins to understand father’s undisclosed shame. In 1941, twenty-year-old Henry, at his father’s request, joined the Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst (the Jewish Order Service), the Jewish ghetto police. They were responsible for maintaining order in the community and enforcing Nazi orders, like imposing curfew and supplying and escorting one thousand laborers a day to the Germans. Having witnessed many atrocities, Henry wonders whether he was complicit in oppression and torture — or was he in some small way able to ease the burdens of even one or two people?
Now aware of his father’s choices during the war, Bernard realizes that “to the end of the war and beyond, he had to keep on pretending he was someone he was not.”
When Henry finally asks his son to share his chilling story, he explains, “The Holocaust taught me that you just do not know how a person will react until they face the kind of situations we faced. Some people will give you the shirt off their back while others would steal food from a baby.”
Because so little is known about the actions — much less the inner thoughts — of the Jewish police in Poland during the Holocaust, Tony Bernard’s book is a valuable contribution to Shoah literature. Though it is painful to read, it helps us understand how and why well-meaning people make agonizing, often dangerous choices. Surely this provides some guideposts for us today.
Elaine Elinson is coauthor of the award-winning Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California.
