Meeting Holocaust Survivors

My recollections of meeting holocaust survivors may not be of interest to all as for some reason I am obsessed with the minute details and facts. So I know the places, ages and all that sort of thing - the SS officers and doctors, the number of deaths etc etc. So I remember those things. On the
other hand, I just get a huge blow when I meet a holocaust survivor, not when I'm talking to them, but afterwards. For example when I met Noah Klieger (journalist in Israel who was in Auschwitz) I just asked him the bog-standard questions. It was amazing but he was just a person. Except that when I went over his story and realised that this same body, same eyes had stumbled across corpses of dead Jews and seen shootings and hangings; for him they were not photos in a book or plain words or our naive approximations of events...they were his life. And the blue-green tatoo on his arm doesnt peel off. It was emblazoned thereon by a "real-live" SS. I can't explain it. But if I at least know the facts and hear the words from their own mouths then maybe I can learn to see the way in which they remember. Does that make sense? Its like (not a good analogy) Moshe seeing the aftermath or shadow of hashem's presence, rather than hashem himself. Its a glimpse of another world, then. Who knows. All I know is that this is a legacy that we cannot pass down as easily through books and photographs.

We need to meet the owners of those tatoos, not just look at shoes in a holocaust museum. Some history doesn't die.
Nathan Lyons
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